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(More customer reviews)Imagine if you will that you are onboard a US Navy submarine that has just snuck into Soviet territorial waters to spy on what the other side's navy is doing. From the sonar members of the crew can listen to the screw noise and learn turn counts that identify different Soviet Naval ships and submarines that are plying the seas around you. Your submarine-in this case the USS-Tautog (SSN-639) is here to gather intelligence on Soviet cruise missile submarines that could pose a threat to US carriers. Your captain, in this case Commander Buele G. Balderston drove his sub deeper into Petropavlovsk whereupon they collided with a Soviet Echo-II class attack boat. This was 1970, the half way point in the Cold War, one of three accidents that year, and all of them chronicled in Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew and Annette Lawrence-Drew's `Blind Man's Bluff-The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage'.
While the title may sound like some cheesy hack banged the book out and filled it with questionable information, `Blind Man's Bluff' takes the moderate approach, the authors admitting that sometimes the information is sketchy at times, and speculate on what probably happened, corroborating information from those directly involved aids in fleshing out the true stories told within the book. It details the disastrous first attempt to spy on the Soviets in 1949 when disaster struck the ill-fated USS-Cochino when one of it's batteries exploded, leaving the submarine to flounder in sixteen foot swells before eventually sinking off the coast of Norway. It's crew was rescued by her sister ship, the USS-Tusk, but not before six crewmen were killed-drowned in the stormy seas.
The book also talks at some length about Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the man who singlehandedly created a nuclear navy for the United States. It details Rickover as being a power hungry, arrogant and petty man who made or broke careers as he saw fit, and someone who demanded to know about any projects `his' boats were involved with. Evidence, whether it be technical or personal, is often presented in anecdotal form, often amusing and always enlightening. It praises the Navy as often as it chastises it and allows the reader to develop their own opinions on whether an action was right or wrong.
However, with regards to the 1968 sinking of the USS-Scorpion, it attacks the establishment-the Navy and her departments for a cover-up that has gone on for thirty-two years. When the Scorpion went down, she was in such a sorry state of repair, that one crewmen had been removed over fears expressed in letters written to his superiors. However, it wasn't the fact that Scorpion seemed to be falling apart that caused her to sink, rather a defective torpedo battery leaking within a torpedo and cooked off the 350 lb HBX warhead contained within the weapon that caused her to go down. Memos written from the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Center told of the defective batteries, but were ignored. At first the Navy announced she may have been sunk by the Soviets, then recounted that in order to deny the torpedo theory-stating steadfastly that there was no way a weapon could `cook off' while inside a submarine.
As well the authors attack, and rightfully so, the CIA for their $500 million boondoggle of the American public for the Glomar Explorer fiasco-code named Project: Jennifer, the Glomar Explorer was the CIA's massive ship that was used to hoist an antiquated Soviet Golf-class diesel electric missile submarine out of sixteen-thousand feet of water 1,700 miles north-west of Hawaii. The submarine had sunk, probably due to the same problem that sank the Cochino-an exploding battery. Suffice it to say that Glomar Explorer utterly failed to raise the sub more than 3000 feet, at which point the grapples failed and the Golf fell almost a mile where it shattered to bits on the ocean floor. This didn't stop the CIA from trying again a year later in 1975, and succeeded in raising only 20% of the sub-minus the three nuclear missiles it carried, minus any code books and minus any usable technology. It was this singular event that led to the CIA being scrutinized and stripped of much of its vaunted power.
From submarine delivered wire tapping pods being delivered into Soviet waters to listen in on undersea telephone cables to Snorkel Patty and her collection of hundreds of dolphin pins, `Blind Man's Bluff' delivers humor, excitement, and an easily readable glimpse into the shadowy and very often murky depths of Navy Intelligence, its operations and its people. The book is personable and detailed, fulfilling its criteria of being both informative and entertaining making it a fine addition to anyone's library who is interested in submarines, the US Navy or espionage in general.
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