Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion...

Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion | Ed Offley | First Rate, In Depth Story of a Shameful Cover-up.

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Scorpion Down: Sun...

	Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion Ed Offley Basic Books, 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 46 reviews view larger image
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Well written, plausible theory on the loss of the Scorpion

Well written book by a military affairs journalist who's followed the Scorpion story for 25 years. Briefly, his theory on the sequence of events leading to the submarine's loss:

- The U.S. Navy Submarine Service, to the major irritation of the Soviets, aggressively played chicken with Soviet subs throughout the 50's-70's (widely acknowledged, there were several collisions)

- The Walker spy ring gave the Soviets the ability to read encrypted Navy communications starting in the mid-60's, fully realized with the siezure of Navy cryptographic equipment on the Pueblo in early 1968

- Soviet submarine K-129 was lost with all hands in the Pacific in early 1968; the U.S. submarine Swordfish sailed into Yokosuka shortly thereafter with major damage, leading the Soviets to believe that it collided with K-129 and was responsible for its sinking (btw, for a truly alternative theory of the K-129's loss, read "Red Star Rogue").

- The Soviets believed the U.S. Submarine Service had blood on its hands and wanted revenge. They knew, from decrypted communications, that the Scorpion had been diverted to spy on a Soviet naval exercise near the Azores on its trip back to Norfolk from the Mediterranean. An Echo II Soviet submarine waited for the Scorpion, and sank her. To avoid starting a war in what was already an ugly year (Pueblo, Tet, MLK and Bobby Kennedy asassinations, riots, etc.), the U.S. Navy covered up the sinking.

The author doesn't present any smoking guns, but he's interviewed dozens of former naval officers and enlisted men who confirm that the real details of what happened weren't in keeping with the official story (both the then current Chief of Naval Operations and the then-Commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force told him in the '80s that there was a frantic search under way days before the Navy officially acknowledged it had cause for concern, and the former U.S. naval attache to Moscow got hints from Soviet naval officers that the two navies agreed never to discuss Scorpion or K-129. It's not ironclad, but it's certainly plausible and well researched, and offers a well-written background narrative of the history of the U.S. and Soviet submarine services and their roles in the Cold War. Well worth reading.

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First Rate, In Depth Story of a Shameful Cover-up.

This book is amazing in detail and depth of investigation. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy, and I was amazed at how much I learned of a period in American history in which I was a young adult and thought I knew what was going on. Ed Offley's book opens your eyes to the real dangers we faced in our Cold War confrontation with the Russian submarine fleet. He carefully follows the events leading up to the sinking, and details the machinations behind the decision to cover the incident.
He has interviewed exhaustively, and unearthed facts that may have been hidden forever had he not begun to unravel the mystery years ago.

Ed Offley's background as an investigative and military reporter serves him well in this book. He has tracked down sources who were there, and persuaded them to talk.

The stories of the lost men are heartbreaking, and deserve to be told. The men may be lost, but because of this book, their stories are not.

This is a fascinating book, and well worth the read!

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Still controversial after all these years...

USS Scorpion, a 3500-ton Skipjack class nuclear-powered attack submarine built at Groton, Connecticut, was commissioned in July 1960. Assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, she took part in the development of contemporary submarine warfare tactics and made periodic deployments to the Mediterranean Sea and other areas where the presence of a fast and stealthy submarine would be beneficial.

Scorpion began another Mediterranean cruise in February 1968. The following May, while homeward bound from that tour, she was lost with her entire crew some 400 miles southwest of the Azores. In late October 1968, her remains were found on the sea floor over 10,000 feet below the surface by a towed deep-submergence vehicle deployed from USNS Mizar (T-AGOR-11). Photographs taken then and later showed that her hull had suffered fatal damage while she was running submerged and that even more severe damage occurred as she sank. The cause of the initial damage continues to generate controversy more than three decades later.

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Interesting but not wholly convincing

Ed Offley in "Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon, The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion" rejects the official US Navy chronology of events surrounding the loss of the US Navy nuclear submarine Scorpion on May 22, 1968, and he reaches a controversial conclusion that the Soviet Navy deliberately torpedoed and sank the vessel, a fact then covered up by the US Government (the Soviets, according to Offley, were taking revenge for the loss of their K-129 submarine two months earlier, which they blamed on aggressive US tactics). His evidence for his theories consists largely of interviews with various US Navy officers and enlisted men who remembered events differently than the official accounts. Offley's conclusions might be reduced to three main items:

(1) The search for the missing Scorpion did not begin after the submarine failed to show up at its homeport in Norfolk, Virginia, on May 27, 1968, but instead it was triggered several days earlier by the failure of the sub to communicate by radio as scheduled. The Navy, at the time and subsequently, covered up the existence of this early search.

(2) The US Navy actually found the lost submarine only a few days after the search began, not several months later according to the official reports, the Soviets having tipped off the Navy as to the lost vessel's location.

(3) The Scorpion was sunk by a Soviet torpedo.

Offley's first conclusion - that the search began in earnest even before the Scorpion failed to show up at Norfolk - appears tenable, based as it is upon by statements from Admiral Schade, commander of the Atlantic submarine force at the time, and from Admiral Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations. These statements are backed up by anecdotal accounts from personnel involved in the actual search. Although the Navy covered up this search at the time and later, no sinister motive need be invoked. The Scorpion was engaged in a classified operation and submarine activities in general were a matter of secrecy. And, like all cover-ups, once a cover-up begins, it is almost impossible to step away from it: covering up the cover-up becomes a goal in itself. Besides, it would have been embarrassing to admit that the Navy had left the families of the missing submariners in ignorance after the Navy itself had concluded that the ship may well have been lost.

The second conclusion - that the Scorpion was found months before official reports indicated - is more poorly supported, and it is not clear to me just what the Navy would stand to gain from such an additional cover-up (which would cost it great amounts of unnecessary time and money). The plain truth is that in any large, complex event there will always be some people who will remember things differenty, who may come to sincerely believe they saw or experienced something quite different from what those around them saw and experienced. In the absense of better evidence, I am inclined to treat the supposed evidence for an early discovery of the Scorpion wreckage as an example of this phenomenon.

The final conclusion - that the Soviets deliberately attacked and sank the Scorpion in apparent revenge for what they considered to be US Navy guilt in the early loss of their K-129 submarine - is supported mainly by reports that a hydrophone tape revealed the presence of a Soviet Echo II submarine and a Soviet torpedo at the scene, the existence of this tape supposedly attested to by a Navy school student and his instructor (one of the earlier Amazon reviewers claims this tape was played during boot camp training, but that reviewer evidently failed to read Offley's account attentively; the incident supposedly occurred during hydrophone training). As unlikely as it seems to me that such a top secret recording would be rather casually revealed during a training class, I suppose it is not wholly impossible (I remember a guest lecturer during my own Army Intelligence training three decades ago mentioning a very sensitive secret operation that prompted our regular instructors to caution against revealing what we had heard). Offley's contention that a torpedo sunk the Scorpion must be compared against the technical evidence revealed by the condition of the Scorpion's wreckage. According to Stephen Johnson in "Silent Steel", that wreckage shows clear evidence of a hull collapse at great depth, a collapse that could not occur if the hull interior had already been flooded as should have happened if a torpedo had struck. Offley, it seems to me, fails to consider alternative scenarios, such as a possible collision between the Scorpion and a Soviet submarine (if he were to insist upon Soviet involvement); conceivably, such a collison might produce the partial flooding and uncontrolled descent to crush depth which would appear to better fit the physical evidence (and also cause damage to the Soviet sub as reported by some of Offley's informants).

I found Offley's book very interesting, but ultimately not wholly convincing (except possibly in the matter of a search launched before the vessels's failure to appear at Norfolk).

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