Soviet submarine K-129 (Golf II)

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К-129 was a project 629А (NATO reporting name Golf-II) diesel submarine of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. On 8 March 1968, she was lost at sea under mysterious circumstances.

The American SOSUS array recorded "an isolated, single sound of an explosion or implosion, 'a good-sized bang'" (Craven, 2001, p.205), on that day. The sound originated from latitude 40 north and longitude 180, which is the exact location where K-129 would later be found, photographed, and salvaged.

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[edit] Discovery and Salvage

In 1969 the wreck of К-129 was discovered by the USS Halibut (SSGN-587) 24 North /163 West, a little more than 300 miles Northwest of Oahu, at approximately 16,000 feet. The wreck was surveyed in detail by the Halibut, and later by Trieste II. The CIA decided to salvage the wreck and analyze the nuclear weapons onboard. Hughes Glomar Explorer was built solely for that purpose, and Operation Jennifer began.

According to the official account which is highly disputed, Glomar Explorer was able to lift the wreck of К-129, but as it was raised the missiles fell out, and the hull broke into three parts, the bow and stern falling back to the ocean floor. Thus, the missiles, the torpedo room, and the engine room were lost. What, exactly, was recovered is highly classified, but the Soviets assumed that the United States recovered torpedoes with nuclear warheads, operations manuals, and code notebooks and machines.

The United States announced that in the section they raised were the bodies of six men. They were buried at sea with full military honors about 90 miles southwest of Hawaii. The videotape of that ceremony was given to the Soviet Union. The relatives of the crew members were not shown the video until many years later. Accounts tell of 70 bodies being located within the forward section of the hull, far away from any escape hatches.

[edit] Explaining the Disaster

Four main theories have been advanced to explain the disappearance of K-129:

  1. flooding from the induction system while charging batteries on the snorkel
  2. a hydrogen explosion in the batteries while charging
  3. collision with USS Swordfish (SSN-579).
  4. an explosion while attempting to launch her missiles

[edit] Flooding Through Snorkel

K-129 could have flooded due to a mechanical failure or human error while running her diesels submerged in order to charge her batteries.

[edit] Hydrogen Explosion

Lead-acid batteries vent explosive hydrogen gas during the charging process. If not properly vented, that gas could have accumulated into an explosive concentration. Still, submariners have understood this risk -- and had procedures to mitigate it -- for nearly a century.

Concerning the hydrogen explosion theory, Dr. John P. Craven, former chief scientist of the US Navy's Special Projects Office and former head of the DSSP and DSRV programs, commented:

I have never seen or heard of a submarine disaster that was not accompanied by the notion that the battery blew up and started it all. [...] Naive investigators, examining the damage in salvaged battery compartments, invariably blame the sinking on battery explosions until they learn that any fully charged battery suddenly exposed to seawater will explode. It is an inevitable effect of a sinking and almost never a cause. (Craven, 2001, p.215)

[edit] Collision with USS Swordfish

The collision theory is the official opinion of the Soviet Navy, and is officially denied by the United States Navy. According to the United States Navy version of the story, Swordfish did put into Yokosuka, Japan shortly after the disappearance of К-129, and received emergency repairs to a bent periscope reported to be caused by ice in the Sea of Japan. K-129's reinforced keel, however, which was installed when the hull was lengthened in order to receive the trio of missile launch tubes, was far too sturdy to be ripped open by the much weaker sail of the Swordfish. The Soviet supposition that Swordfish had broken open the hull of K-129 can not be substantiated by any mechanical study or reconstruction.

[edit] Attempted Missile Launch

K-129 was found at latitude 40 north, which is far south of her assigned patrol area. Dr. John P. Craven, former chief scientist of the US Navy's Special Projects Office and former head of the DSSP and DSRV programs, commented that this fact alone implies a high probability that K-129 was a rogue:

When [K-129] passed [longitude] 180, it should have been farther north, at a latitude of 45 degrees, or more than three hundred miles away. If that was a navigational mistake it would be an error of historic proportions. Thus if the sub were not somewhere in the vicinity of where the Soviets supposed it to be, there would be a high probability, if not a certainty, that the submarine was a rogue, off on its own, in grave disobedience of its orders." (Craven, 2001, p. 206)

In 2005, the book "Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.," by former American submariner Kenneth Sewell in collaboration with journalist Clint Richmond, claimed that K-129 did indeed sink 300 miles northwest of Oahu on 7 March 1968 while attempting to launch one of her three ballistic missiles in a rogue attack on Pearl Harbor. This theory has been criticised as a speculative conspiracy theory by the head of the contemporary history branch of the U.S. Naval Historical Center.

The sinking was supposedly caused by the explosion of one of the ballistic missiles while being readied for launch. That could have been due to a failure in the liquid-fuel system, although Craven (2001, p.218) says it was probably due to a failsafe mechanism intended to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. In any case, the explosion of an unlaunched ballistic missile is consistent with Blind Man's Bluff's claim of "a hole blown nearly ten feet wide just behind the Golf's conning tower" (Sontag et. al.). On Golf-class submarines, the missile compartments are integrated directly abaft the conning tower.

Craven also noted:

"While the Russian submarine was presumed to be at sea, an oceanographic ship of the University of Hawaii was conducting research in the oceanic waters off Hawaii's Leeward Islands. The researchers discovered a large slick on the surface of the ocean, collected a sample, and found that it was highly radioactive. They reported this to George Woolard, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysical Research." (Craven, 2001, p.216)

[edit] Further Intrigue

Red Star Rogue also claims to present evidence that Project Jennifer recovered virtually all of K-129 from the ocean floor. Sewell says that the hull breaking during raising and the missile falling out is a CIA cover story (Red Star Rogue, p. 243), and in fact "Despite an elaborate cover-up and the eventual claim that Project Jennifer had been a failure, most of K-129 and the remains of the crew were, in fact, raised from the bottom of the Pacific and brought into the Glomar Explorer." (Red Star Rogue, p. 226)

Craven (2001, p.221) suggests that Project Jennifer's real goal was not code books or equipment at all; rather, the project sought to determine exactly what K-129 was doing at 40N/180 where she did not belong. Such information could be (and supposedly was) utilized within Henry Kissinger's foreign policy of "Deterrance Through Uncertainty", in order to "raise an unanswerable question in Brezhnev's mind about his command and control of his armed forces".

Retired United States Navy Captain Peter Huchthausen, former naval attaché in Moscow, had a brief conversation in 1987 with Soviet admirals concerning К-129. Huchthausen states that Admiral Peter Navojtsev told him, "Captain, you are very young and inexperienced, but you will learn that there were some matters that both nations have agreed to not discuss, and one of these is the reasons we lost K-129." In 1995, when Huchthausen began work on a book about the Soviet underwater fleet, he interviewed Admiral Victor Dygalo, who stated that the true history of К-129 has not been revealed because of the informal agreement between the two countries' senior naval commands. The purpose of that secrecy, he alleged, is to stop any further research into the losses of USS Scorpion (SSN-589) and К-129. Huchthausen states that Dygalo told him to "overlook this matter, and hope that the time will come when the truth will be told to the families of the victims."

[edit] Bibliography

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