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Lets face it, unless someone in the Kremlin or Washington has some hard evidence as to really what happened to K-129 and is willing to divulge this information, I guess we will never really know what happened. But I must admit it makes for a good discussion.
Nemo |
from the kremlin we will probly learn about K129 in 2030 and from washington about 2020 but who knows
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Review of Red Star Rogue in today's Moscow Times:
Deep Secrets Did the Soviets try to launch a nuclear weapon at Pearl Harbor in 1968? By Gary E. Weir Published: October 14, 2005 In "Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.," former American submariner Kenneth Sewell, in collaboration with journalist Clint Richmond, reexamines the 1968 loss of K-129, a Soviet Golf II-class missile submarine. Revisiting this well-known story and the CIA's aborted effort to recover the hull under the guise of the highly classified Project Jennifer, the author argues that K-129 actually attempted to launch a nuclear weapon against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. He portrays this as part of an effort by Politburo hardliners to arrest what they perceived as the beginning of a rapprochement with the United States and a liberalization within Soviet society under Leonid Brezhnev. Sewell builds a fast-paced, circumstantial case for the existence of this political environment in the Politburo and for the plot it might have inspired under the direction of the conservative communist ideologue Mikhail Suslov. The open literature has long alluded to the activities of such anti-detente reactionaries. According to Sewell, a group of mysterious men joined the boat before sailing and eventually commandeered the vessel, taking the submarine out of its normal patrol area, toward Hawaii, and then dying with the rest of the crew when an explosion sent K-129 to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The author also suggests that Project Jennifer actually recovered the entire vessel for close examination and subsequently spread disinformation to the effect that billionaire Howard Hughes' vessel, the Glomar Explorer, had recovered only the forward third. While the political context provides interesting reading, the revelations offered in "Red Star Rogue" depart completely from history and present a doubtful scenario based largely on surmise. When I joined the project that eventually emerged, in 2003, as "Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War," I intended to record the full-career oral histories of Russian officers who expressed a willingness to speak with me. Those supporting my effort felt that these naval officers, formed by the Soviet system, would recoil at the sight of a digital voice recorder and prefer some measure of anonymity. Over many days, as I conducted interviews that lasted hours and exhausted two translators, the dreaded request for anonymity never came. Given the revelations I received, I knew the story would be somewhat sensational. For a historian, regardless of the circumstances, history must rest on evidence that the writer can attribute to people and institutions -- evidence a reader can confirm. This has been a priority of my work in Cold War history over the last 20 years. But I also needed to write reliable history because of the access and trust extended to me by the Russian officers and their families. As conversations progressed, I was frequently invited to look through family photo albums while sharing a meal, some vodka and a tour of one modest apartment after another. Wives asked me about my Catherine and what she prepared at mealtime and how. On my next visit to St. Petersburg I have to keep my promise to share Catherine's recipe for Southern fried chicken with Rear Admiral Lev Chernavin's marvelous wife. I owed these people a professional history, not a bit of sensation. "Red Star Rogue" is plagued by sensation and lack of credibility. The most important historical problem involves the arrival of the mysterious 11 crewmen. The author offers no evidence that this took place. The best he can do is point to the number of medals awarded to the crew years later by President Vladimir Putin -- 11 more than the ship's usual complement. Yet ships of all sizes and types frequently go to sea with additional personnel, and at times these people fall victim to tragedy. In 1941, the German battleship Bismarck sent HMS Hood to the bottom and, with her, workers from a British shipyard. The American submarine USS Thresher also had additional personnel on board when she submerged for the last time. The author's description of this Golf II coming to the surface near Hawaii to launch its missiles only exacerbates the credibility problem. K-129 experienced an overhaul in 1967 modifying her according to Project 629A to fire R-21, system D-4, submerged launch missiles under an order dated July 2, 1962. The boat also received the Sigma 629A navigation system, and, in early 1968, a towed communications antenna called Paravan. For K-129, the first two modifications concluded on June 22, 1967 -- not in 1966, as the author claims -- and doubtless required repeated technical shakedown tests at sea after installation. This process would be completely normal in any navy and could very easily account for personnel onboard other than assigned crewmembers. It also discounts the assumption that K-129 surfaced to launch her missiles, a key component of the story. Sewell makes note of the technical conversion but never truly factors the upgrades into his story. He just tells us that the boat surfaced to launch in spite of the new capability -- a decision no submariner or conspirator would have made. Why fire in full view of probable American surveillance when one can stay submerged and unseen? This is the very reason for having submerged-launch capability in the first place. An evaluation of Sewell's use of sources also raises questions. Fourteen interviewees requested anonymity, while the officers with whom I worked -- one of them only semi-retired and still serving on active duty -- never suggested withholding their names. This presents an issue of credibility. In addition, some sources claim less than this story suggests. The author mentions John Pina Craven, chief scientist for the American Polaris Ballistic Missile Project in the 1960s, noting the possibility of a rogue launch. However, an examination of Craven's book "The Silent War" shows that he immediately declared it unlikely and never qualified his conclusion. In addition, Soviet missile submarines were a relatively frequent occurrence off the American East Coast in the mid-1960s; I interviewed a number of their commanding officers. Having Soviet nuclear warheads within striking distance in 1968 could not have seemed new to the CIA or the Navy. At that point in time, the United States sought to keep close track of them, with the proper countermeasures at the ready. In "Red Star Rogue," Sewell asks for trust but provides very little for the reader to lean on. Too much of the story is thin air. Barring the emergence of new documentation and verifiable oral histories, his book fails as history and offers only modest thrills for the imaginative. Gary E. Weir heads the contemporary history branch of the U.S. Naval Historical Center. |
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Nemo |
One of the simplest yet overlooked questions raised against this book is whether the Chinese even had a true SLBM capability. 1000 Pardons if somebody asked this already, but Rogue presumes that the attack was meant to frame the Chinese for nuking Pearl Harbor, but as near as I can tell, the Chinese hadn't sucessfully tested an SLBM until the 1970's (and not from a submarine until the early '80s), notwithstanding their possession of earlier Golf boats during the period of K-129's loss.
I thought it ironic that the book relies on Craven's idea (minimized by Craven himself) that -129 had indeed gone rogue, given that they also slam his claim that the unrecovered part of the ship disintegrated when dropped by the Clementine recovery robot, and that in "Blind Man's Bluff", Craven criticized the soundness of "Project Jennifer" which Rogue posits as having been entirely successful. "Rogue" was a horrible book, probably the single most glaring example of forced supposition I've encountered since reading Berlitz's "The Philadelphia Experiment". |
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First, it is claimed in the book on several pages that the explosion of the missile on board the K-129 was observed by a US early warning satellite. The problem with that is that the MIDAS program was cancelled in 1966, and the follow up for them, Project 949, wasn't launched until August of 1968, several months after the K-129 sank (March of 1968). In fact, according to the exhaustive history of intelligence satellites, "Guardians", there weren't *ANY* US visual or infrared satellites in operation at the time of the event. Secondly, the claim is made that sound recordings at the time were processed on Cray supercomputers. Except that Cray Research wasn't founded until 1972, and the first machine came off the assembly line in 1976. Also, the claim is made that the Russians didn't know we could DF their signals. Absolute crap, they knew. I couldn't finish reading the thing, because I kept finding egregious errors or misstatements. |
I didn't have the book "Guardians" in front of me earlier, so here is the information:
Guardians Strategic Reconnaissance Satellites by Curtis Peebles Presidio Press, 1987 ISBN 0-89141-284-0 Chapter 17, "U.S. Early Warning Satellites", and Appendix B: Military Satellite Launches, 1959-1985 have the relevent data. |
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