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Submarine Warfare in Puget Sound

author: Townsend Hope
Dec 10, 2004 08:21

It's an old story--this one from the late Cold War--the Government tells the lie that the Media calls the truth.

He was found floating next to his boat, two hundred yards off southeast Whidbey Island. A fitness buff and excellent swimmer, ex-FBI agent Jerry Pennington was publisher, president, and CEO of the Seattle Times, the region’s leading newspaper. It was March 15, 1985. His newspaper would quietly lay him to rest with an eulogy two days later. Pennington’s death was the bookend to four months of peculiar Puget Sound events. Local media had faithfully followed the government’s narrative, but one of his reporters had slipped in a detail that deviated from the script. That detail was the key to the other bookend--and would presage Mr. Pennington’s demise.


Washington State’s Whidbey Island bisects an inland sea, commonly referred to as the Puget Sound. Its northwestern coast is on the east entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the seaway to the Pacific Ocean. From central Whidbey south, the island’s west coastline is the eastern shore of Admiralty Inlet. At the island’s southern point Admiralty Inlet opens into Puget Sound proper, location of the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. Hood Canal, location of the Trident ballistic-missile submarine base at Bangor, enters Admiralty Inlet from the west. The north entrance of Admiralty Inlet, a choke point of shipping, was once known as the Triangle of Death, due to the three costal artillery fortifications that in the early 20th Century protected the entrance of this strategic waterway. It was said of these fortifications that “not a shot was fired in anger.” That might not be true of the late 20th Century, when the Triangle of Death became the Cold War’s last battlefield.

In the mid-1980’s Soviet submarines ‘went quiet all of a sudden.’ As the result of espionage “the Soviet Union was not only able to quiet its own subs, but also was better able to detect and follow America’s Trident missile subs.”(1) The Soviets would need only to wait at Admiralty Inlet’s north entrance for a Trident sub, fat with its twenty-four multiple-nuclear-warhead missiles, on its way to deployment in the open ocean.



In the early morning hours of December 7, 1984, the sea-lanes through and the airspace above Admiralty Inlet were closed to all traffic. The Coast Guard said that the shipping lanes were closed due to “extremely hazardous conditions.”(2) Until allowed transit, the Seattle bound Alaska State ferry M/V Columbia circled for hours in the east entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When the Columbia arrived in Seattle, a radio interview with crewmembers reported naval activity in northern Admiralty Inlet. No other vessels were allowed transit. A local resident, with a direct view across Admiralty Bay toward central Whidbey Island’s Lagoon Point, witnessed at dawn dark gray ships arrayed with their bows pointed out from the Inlet’s eastern shore. Four unmarked dark gray ships had been previously observed, across the Inlet, in the Olympic Peninsula’s Discovery Bay, west of Port Townsend.

The closure of shipping lanes and the large presence of military hardware and personnel would be attributed to a police action. According to the FBI, Robert J. Mathews--who two weeks earlier had been shot in Portland, Oregon, and while bleeding heavily eluded an FBI dragnet--was now barricaded in a central Whidbey Island vacation cottage situated on a bluff northeast of Lagoon Point. Mathews was said to be the leader of an Aryan Nation splinter group known as the White American Bastion. Subsequently, this group would become the Bruders Schweigen, “the Silent Brotherhood”, a domestic terrorist organization. “The Silent Brotherhood”, an amalgam of the submariner’s “Silent Service” and George Orwell’s 1984 “the Brotherhood”, would evolve yet again to become known as, simply, “the Order.”

A Seattle Times reporter inadvertently witnessed and reported on the final moments of what was to become known as “The Siege on Whidbey Island.” After nightfall, on December 8, a Navy helicopter hovered over the cottage dropping illumination flares.(3) After an intense fire that blinded onlookers to the night, a body would be found in a bathtub. According to the FBI, Mathews died in a “fiery shootout with the FBI.” Shipping lanes were reopened without comment, no credible reason was ever given for the closure. A Whidbey Island newspaper opined: “The operation was huge in scope, using a small army of federal agents and a massive supply of military hardware.”(4)

A huge propaganda offensive ensued in order to create a persona that was commensurate with the event. For over a decade and a half this legend was promoted in newspapers, magazines, books, and in 1999, a book based movie--The Brotherhood of Murder. Robert Mathews has lived on as a heroic martyr, most notably for Timothy McVeigh; the Oklahoma City bomber.

Other things happened while the tale of this band of neo-nazis and their fallen leader blotted newspaper headlines.


Large American-flagged ships were ordered out of Puget Sound ports. The distance between ship traffic and Protection Island at the mouth of Discovery Bay was maximized. A Coast Guard cutter had been stationed in the east entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the ships transiting from Admiralty Inlet into the Strait made the turn wide to the east and north. Then, on December 13, a Navy EA-6B electronic countermeasure jet aircraft exploded in mid-flight above Discovery Bay.

An eyewitness to the crash said “the plane appeared to be flying at cloud level when it made a ‘poosh’ sound and lit up, then began trailing fire and descending at a 45-degree angle.”(5) The structure of events and the nature of the crash are indicative of a missile hit--that a submarine launched anti-aircraft missile, known by the acronym SLAM, brought this airplane down. That Navy pilots subsequently became concerned by the threat of a SLAM is evidenced by an incident in San Diego on January 11, 1985, when clouds of radar-jamming chaff dropped by the Navy drifted ashore and knocked out power for 65,000 utility customers and crippled civilian radar.

The military events of the 1984 superpower confrontation have not yet been placed in history, but a hot year had just gotten a whole lot hotter. To be brief--as this is the job of our laggard historians--the United States and its allies were now in a world wide search for elusive Soviet submarines. Strategic missile bases of the American mid-west had been placed on alert, and NATO and the Warsaw Pact were in active preparation for a central European war.

The penultimate event occurred when a task force of American aircraft carrier battle groups stormed toward the military bases of the Soviet Far East. According to the New York Times: “One civilian official quoted experienced military officers as describing it as ‘the most vigorous Soviet reaction’ to any military movement of its kind since World War II.”(6) “Another official described the Soviet response as the kind of alert the Russians would launch if their defense controllers thought Soviet military installations were about to be attacked.”(7)

A turning point had been reached.

The silence on these and the other numerous events of 1984 is a denial of the rightful place in history of the men and women of that era’s military. It was they, whose steadfast resolve at the door of annihilation, saved the Earth from the folly of world leaders.


Back in Washington State things would continue to bubble to the surface.

On the afternoon of December 21,1984 an oil spill was noticed off south Whidbey Island. Ultimately, the size of this spill would be conservatively estimated at 5,000 gallons of a medium to heavy marine-grade distillate fuel oil. This fuel spill was unusual in that its source was in the middle of north Puget Sound and that the dispersal pattern was as if it was from a point-source that distributed the oil onto area beaches by tidal action. The apparent locus of the spill was in an area of the Sound that is up to 700 feet deep. Oil samples were taken from ships that had been in the area and no matches were found. Subsequent smaller related spills occurred and they were quickly mopped up. After several months the investigation was cancelled. No source for this oil has ever been identified.

Then, late in the afternoon of January 11, 1985, the fishing boat Nomsuch was pulling its net up from the mouth of Rich Passage; this waterway winds its way to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. In the Nomsuch’s net was an unusual catch: a large gray cylinder. Authorities were called and the boat was quarantined off Seattle’s Shilshole marina. For several hours Navy and Coast Guard officials, joined by the Seattle Police bomb squad, treated the object as an explosive device before making the determination that this was a Mark-36 concrete filled anti-submarine ‘drill mine’. This “concrete filled” anti-submarine mine was then transported to the Indian Island Naval Weapons Station.(8)



It has taken two decades for the mist of time to clarify the fog of this war. It is now a known fact that in 1984 the United States was pitted against the Soviet Union in an intense anti-submarine campaign. Due to the Soviet’s surprise deployment of a vastly quieter nuclear-powered attack submarine they were able to sneak into the Puget Sound home of the Trident. The events that occurred in Washington State in December 1984 and January 1985 are the classic markers of anti-submarine warfare. It can now be stated that on December 7, 1984 the U.S. Navy brought a submerged object, most likely a salvaged Soviet submarine, to the waters off Whidbey Island; and then possibly scuttled this object in the depths of north Puget Sound.

Any conspiracy theory worth its salt needs bodies, this one has two: a badly burned body in a bathtub and a drowned man floating next to his overturned boat. These are the bookends, between them lies the secret history--of December 1984.



Notes

1 "Other Spy Probes Run More Quietly Than Lee’s; No Publicity, Charges When Soviets Obtained Sub Secrets in 1978", The Washington Post, by Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb, 11-06-2000.
2 "Federal agents surround house in island manhunt", Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12-8-1984.
3 "Mathews believed dead in blazing house", Seattle Times, 12-10-84.
4 "FBI operation", Whidbey News-Times, 12-12-1984.
5 "Jet crew saw warning sign before blast", The Daily News (Port Angeles), 12-14-84.
6 "U.S. Ships Met by Soviet Alert Off Major Base", by Hedrick Smith, New York Times, 12-19-84.
7 "2 U.S. Carriers Meet Soviet Response in Far East", New York Times, 12-19-84.
8 "Fishing boat in Puget Sound hauls up ‘drill mine’ from waters off Bainbridge", Everett Herald, 1-12-85.

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