Operation Ivy Bells

True Spies, Episode 167 - Operation Ivy Bells

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino, and this is True Spies, from SPYSCAPE Studios.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The whole point of all this submarine intelligence gathering was to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age.

NARRATOR: We’re on the fifth floor of The Pentagon - HQ of the United States Department of Defense - 1970. It’s 3 am, most of the lights are off, the last cigarette has been put out, and the offices are quiet. But one room remains brightly lit. This is where Captain James Bradley has a flash of inspiration. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Bradley was sitting behind his triple-locked doors in his unmarked office because what he did was so secretive. And he started dreaming, thinking back to his days as a boy on the Mississippi River. 

NARRATOR: He’s the head of undersea intelligence gathering at the US Navy. The Cold War is escalating, and he has a completely outlandish idea. If it fails, the consequences could be nuclear.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He used to like to ride on the Paddlewheel steamers as they went down the river. He suddenly started thinking of the signs he used to see on the shore - “Cable crossing. Do not anchor” - to warn boaters not to put their anchor down and destroy some kind of communications cable. 

NARRATOR: It hits him. He’s going to gain a considerable advantage for the Americans.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He always had the idea that there must be undersea communications cables connecting Soviet naval bases and the leaders in the Kremlin.

NARRATOR: Not only that, he’s also convinced that the Russians will have put a sign on the coast telling him where the secret cable is, just like in his childhood memories. With this idea, he is going to violate the very soul of their secrecy and glimpse into their collective psyche. Listening to the Soviets unfiltered would be an intelligence coup unmatched by any human spy. In this episode of True Spies, you’ll hear how Captain Bradley made his dream come true. But Bradley has to overcome some immense hurdles: One - he doesn’t know if a communications cable is actually how the Soviets are talking to their naval bases. Two - if they are, then where is the cable? Three - how do you then lay down a listening device on a cable, 300 feet below the surface of the sea? Four - the technology to tap a cable underwater doesn’t yet exist. And finally, he has to convince his bosses - National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon - as well as the Navy, CIA, and NSA, to get on board with his idea. To get any of this done, he needs a submarine and a crew. 

SHERRY SONTAG: Everybody was terrified during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What they didn't realize was that missiles were being brought to each other's shores throughout a large portion of the Cold War. 

NARRATOR: Meet your guides for this Cold War Mission: Impossible.

SHERRY SONTAG: I'm Sherry Sontag, co-author of Blind Man's Bluff. A book about submarines and spies during the Cold War. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: I am Christopher Drew, the co-author of Blind Man's Bluff. I'm also a former New York Times reporter, and I teach journalism at Louisiana State University. 

NARRATOR: In 1970, Cold War espionage is moving into a new and dangerous phase.

SHERRY SONTAG: Instead of the early spy efforts, which were, “Can we see what's being launched from the other guys?” Can we watch their bases?” It became, “Can we follow their submarines? Can we keep track of their submarines?” So if there's ever a first strike, we can take out their submarines before those submarines could launch a second strike. 

NARRATOR: These two great superpowers - the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR - are neighbors. In fact, during the winter months in the Arctic, the two countries freeze together as one. But the bitter paranoia of both sides is constant and their behavior is hard to predict. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: It really goes back to the end of World War II. When all the German equipment was divided up. The Russians got a bunch of these snorkel submarines, thus setting off concerns in the US that the Russians were going to build on this advanced German technology and create a potent force that needed to be dealt with. 

NARRATOR: Both sides have increased their naval capacity substantially in the preceding decades. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The best way to take out other submarines is with submarines. 

NARRATOR: They sail into each other’s waters. There are regular detections and alerts. All it would take is a nervous captain from either side to blow things out of proportion.

SHERRY SONTAG: The fact is, there was a distinct fear on both sides of what the other side would do.

NARRATOR: The two nations have been described as being: “like two men in a smoke-filled room endlessly playing cards, both of them cheating, but neither being able to accuse the other - because that would end the game”.

SHERRY SONTAG: The rhetoric was always that the enemy was capable of anything. People were very afraid that there would be a nuclear war.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: And because it had been so devastating, Pearl Harbor in World War II, and the stakes were so much immensely higher in the Cold War that's what haunted everyone to prevent a surprise attack on the US.

NARRATOR: Imagine that you’re a captain in the Navy. Your comms light up. An enemy sub is within striking distance of your coast. They look like they’re preparing for a nuclear missile launch. You think about your family, your friends, your regrets, and your achievements. This is the moment the world ends. Moments later, a call comes back down the line telling you the enemy is on drills. Wipe the sweat from your brow. That was close. The submarines of the 1970s are formidable machines.

SHERRY SONTAG: Once submarines went completely under the water, they were really almost invisible.

NARRATOR: On the surface, they’re easy targets - big, unstable, erratic. Below the waves, they command the darkness. They’re silent assassins, ghosts of the sea, and can carry astonishing amounts of firepower. The nuclear reactors on board mean that they can now stay submerged for weeks. Submarine activity is frequent. The Soviets and the US are monitoring each other, taunting each other, testing each other - stalking each other. 

SHERRY SONTAG: The mission starts at the Sea of Okhotsk, which separates the mainland Soviet Union from military bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

NARRATOR: The Sea of Okhotsk is tucked away to the far east of the USSR; a vast, endless sprawl north of Japan’s Kuril Islands. It’s strictly off-limits to foreign vessels. Sound detection devices listen for intruders, and it’s home to the Soviet Union's largest submarine base, housing most, if not all, of their Pacific fleet.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: It was a very desolate area with not too many ships, a lot of fishing trawlers, and occasional Soviet submarines testing missiles. 

NARRATOR: The tranquil surface conceals the dangers below. A tiny port is neatly hidden among volcanoes and primeval birch forests. It’s like something out of a James Bond movie - but swap the tropical island for a freezing, bleak, and lonely landscape. Captain James Bradley is convinced the communications cables, and their accompanying “Do Not Anchor” signs, will be here. He is going to search, illegally, for a single crucial strand in 611,000-square-miles of open water. Through this cable, the Soviet Union could command an attack on Washington in less than an hour.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: We were really at the height of the Cold War at this point. There was a lot of suspicion on both sides. There were movies from Hollywood. “The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming.” So it was a very volatile, high-risk time.

NARRATOR: But officially, Bradley still needs the permission of the US president to scout the Sea of Okhotsk. And he hasn’t got it.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Intelligence missions at that time were reviewed by something called the ‘40 Committee’ with a lot of National Security officials from all the Agencies. And Bradley did not want to have to go in front of this formal group and make a presentation and explain that this whole idea about the cable and how to find it had come from his 3 am dream in the Pentagon about his boyhood. 

NARRATOR: He’s clever but he’s a captain in a town full of admirals, and those above him don’t like getting their shoes stepped on. The tides of Washington’s political scene are treacherous. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He just followed his own path and he didn't worry about whether he was going to get promoted to admiral himself.

NARRATOR: Bradley counts his successes in dollars and enemies, and he needs both to launch his plan into action.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He went to Alexander Haig, who was Kissinger's deputy. He had waited and waited for Kissinger. And Kissinger had said, ”I can only give you 10 minutes,” when he came. And Bradley said, “Well, we better just scratch it and start over another time.” Kissinger said, “Go ahead” and listened for 45 minutes. Bradley had commanded respect from Kissinger.

NARRATOR: Bradley was a great storyteller. He would often package his facts with great tales of the sea; the mystery and adventure, the courage of a ship’s crew, the romantic and devastating power of mother nature, and the machines that attempt to tame her. He could bring an admiral to tears. He explained, without saying how he came up with the idea, that the Navy thought there was a cable there that might be tapped and have important information. And Haig said, simply, “Keep us informed.” And that was all the approval he got.  It was enough for James Bradley.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He decided the best thing to do was to go right up to the Soviet coast in the Sea of Okhotsk. Look through the periscope for a cable crossing sign. 

NARRATOR: Every briefing is now a potential leak and the words “top secret”, and “need to know” will be increasingly commonplace for Bradley. Only five people - including the president - would know about the mission. He’s given a submarine, the USS Halibut.

SHERRY SONTAG: It looked like the least seaworthy boat ever put out to sea. 

NARRATOR: Unlike the flat fish she’s named after, The Halibut is an old submarine with a huge hump where her missiles were once stored. The hump came to be known as the Bat Cave. But the submarine’s fighting days were over. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: It had been converted by Captain Bradley and a Navy scientist named John Craven into a special projects’ sub that first was searching for parts of Soviet test missiles. The Soviets would test-fire missiles just like North Korea does now. And the missiles would land in the sea. The US could reconstruct them and learn about how far they could go and their various properties. 

NARRATOR: Not only that, when it found the shards of the missiles on the sea bed, it could bring them aboard and take them home to be reconstructed. It’s a very long-winded and expensive way of finding out what kind of tech the Soviets were using. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: And then when a Soviet submarine had sunk in 1968, The Halibut was sent to dangle cameras to the ocean bottom. It took 22,000 photographs, and that led the CIA to work with Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, to build a huge ship to try to raise the submarine. So while that was going on, Bradley was looking for a second act for The Halibut. 

NARRATOR: This submarine shoots photos, not missiles. And now, it has a new purpose. Bradley and his team had to go away and develop waterproof tapping devices that could access what was inside the cable without damaging it. They also had to develop a way of laying the tap down from a 5000-ton submarine, making the best use of the Bat Cave. 

SHERRY SONTAG: And all that extra space meant that people like Craven and Bradley, who were coming up with these interesting spy missions, had room to put things, had room to put gear, had room to put divers. 

NARRATOR: The Halibut is also carrying a very handy piece of kit, a safety net should things go awry: a DSRV, or Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle. 

SHERRY SONTAG: The submarine would carry its own lifeboat, basically, on its back. If there was an accident, these rescue vehicles could ferry submariners back and forth to safety. The first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle that was launched to a lot of fanfare was actually bolted to the back of The Halibut.

NARRATOR: But, in the new and improved Halibut, appearances can be deceiving. 

SHERRY SONTAG: The DSRV in the end was not a rescue vehicle at all. What it was was hidden in a plain sight decompression chamber for divers. 

NARRATOR: Divers are going to acclimatize to the depth of the sea - 300 feet down - in this secret chamber. Then, they’ll leave the submarine in their special suits and lay down the cable tap. The USS Halibut is ready for her mission. It’s October 1971, less than a year since the mission was dreamed up. She’s going for a three-month round trip, and Commander John E. McNish is under orders to not tell his crew the real purpose of the mission. 

SHERRY SONTAG: It was very dangerous.

NARRATOR: The commander declares that Halibut is there to find pieces of the new Soviet ship-to-ship missile. Only McNish, his officers, and the divers - known as the ‘special projects team’ - knew what they were really there for. James Bradley, the brains of the operation, is to stay at home. 

SHERRY SONTAG: With the submarine that was laden with all the gear to accomplish this mission, it took them a month to get there from the Pacific Coast of the United States.

NARRATOR: They move out from Mare Island, California as modern-day pirates, rulers of the deep. The governor of California, a man called Ronald Wilson Reagan, is oblivious. They sail north to the Aleutian Islands, down through the icy Bering Strait, and past Soviet surface ships to reach the Sea of Okhotsk. Through the periscope, they see the volcano looming over the secluded port. If sunlight was to catch the lens, the crew would be discovered - and they would not be returning home. The US government would deny any involvement. The families would never bury their dead. All the while, the sub’s two underwater cameras search tirelessly.

SHERRY SONTAG: The guys call them the fish. They would launch the fish from the Batcave that helped The Halibut find missile parts that the Soviets had launched. Help The Halibut find the cable that Bradley imagined late at night, sitting in the Pentagon. 

NARRATOR: The fish swim for a week and find nothing, and The Halibut remains undetected. James Bradley is far away, unaware that his idea for the mission isn’t working. Halibut moves inside the three-mile exclusion zone around the coast of the Soviet Union. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Clearly, it had to go inside the three to be looking for little signs on the beach.

NARRATOR: Just its presence this close could cause a nervous Soviet watch to suspect that the Americans are enacting a first strike, lighting the match on the nuclear powder keg. They move up the coast following an S-shaped path to minimize visibility, occasionally performing a move known as a ‘Crazy Ivan’ - a hard turn to surprise anybody trailing her and positioning the submarine to attack. The periscope is extended, and the crew sees something. It’s sitting on a beach, far up on the northernmost half of the Sea of Okhotsk. It’s a sign. It reads: “Do Not Anchor. Cable.” 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He was right about the signs on the beach and the cable. 

NARRATOR: This is the X that marks the spot. Here be treasure. The Halibut crew sight the cable, and follow it 40 miles back out to sea to where the seabed is flat. It took a day to maneuver The Halibut next to the line and deploy the divers. They’re 300 feet down in the dark as they adjust to the pressure. They leave the decoy hump on Halibut’s back and lay down the first cable tap. Listening in, the divers can hear somebody speaking. 

SHERRY SONTAG: Who would have had the nerve to send a submarine basically inside a Soviet bay up against the Soviet coastline? And who would have had the technology to get people down there who could literally wrap a device around their physical cable and listen? This was their way of speaking without having to worry. It took enormous creativity to come up with a solution that's simple and enormous guts to actually be willing to try that maneuver. 

NARRATOR: Three feet long with a recorder filled with big rolls of tape and a lithium-powered battery, the tap required no cutting of the cable. It used induction technology to wrap around and listen in on the signal coursing through it. The divers left the tape running for hours. All the while, the submarine swayed in the currents. 

SHERRY SONTAG: The cable was connecting the Navy bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula that were across the Sea of Okhotsk from the mainland Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: The Soviets are certain of the cable’s secrecy. Why bother encrypting most of their conversations?

SHERRY SONTAG: It was remarkable that they were able to record for a while and bring these recordings of people speaking in unencrypted Russian back. 

NARRATOR: Captain James Bradley’s daydream, unbelievably, had been correct. His imagination has unlocked the stalemate between the two nations. The majority of the crew on board think the cable has been found by accident, so they then continue finding and collecting Soviet missile shards. A month later, they arrive in the US, carrying a hoard of missile debris and secret tapes.

SHERRY SONTAG: So when The Halibut did make it back, the tapes were taken directly from the boat to the NSA.

NARRATOR: The National Security Agency is located at Fort Meade, Maryland. It’s where the Defense Department sends most of the electronic intelligence picked up by submarines. Russian-speaking linguists and analysts pore over the communications in a building known as the “Anagram Inn”. They don’t know where the tapes have come from. Behind those permanently sealed windows, the tapes are opening up the inner world of the Soviets.

SHERRY SONTAG: Bradley never actually heard a word directly from the tapes, but did hear later that they were indeed filled with high-level conversations that people were hoping to find as well as some not-so-high-level conversations. I think later they actually recorded some Russian kid trying to practice wooing his girlfriend in English. 

NARRATOR: The NSA wants more information but this time everything needs to be above board. James Bradley begins the formal process of getting approval from the ‘40 Committee’ - the nickname given to the top-secret group of senior US government officials who oversaw covert operations conducted by the CIA. He still doesn’t mention how the idea first came about - that boyhood Mississippi hunch. He doesn’t mention that a submarine has already been there and he neglects to mention what would happen if the crew were caught. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: When the US submarines were trailing the Soviet submarines in the open ocean, it was to be able to torpedo them if a war broke out. In tapping the cables, the US was trying to learn everything it could about the Soviet submarine force, including where the missile subs would be hidden. 

NARRATOR: Forty Committee approval is granted, and the USS Halibut legitimately - at least to the US government - leaves Mare Island on August 4, 1972, on its second outing. The new tap is 20 feet long, three feet wide, weighs six tons, and uses a form of nuclear power to keep the tapes running. It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. It’s nicknamed ‘The Beast’. The Halibut, now nicknamed the Bat Boat, is given what looked like wings.

SHERRY SONTAG: The Halibut had self-destruct boxes on board. These men were told that they would never be taken. If they were caught, they were dead. That's how sensitive this was. It was a physical incursion into Soviet waters, and it was a violation in many ways. And in fact, the men worried about that.

NARRATOR: This time, the whole crew knew about the mission and understood the risks. They break down on the way and a quick fix is found. A few weeks later, the cable is re-discovered, the divers roll out, and within a matter of hours, they can hear the familiar Soviet voices again. The divers celebrate by bringing a giant spider crab back on board to scare the nearest unsuspecting submariner witless. The tapes are left to fill up for a few weeks as the crew head to Guam. Here they start raising objections as to how fair this all is. 

SHERRY SONTAG: So is spying fair? Spying is what was done. It was how the Cold War was waged. 

NARRATOR: The missions, which had started out as exciting and novel, now started to feel unnecessarily dangerous. Halibut and her crew have been away from home for nearly five months and most of them are longing for life onshore. But as they return to collect the tapes from The Beast, a powerful storm is brewing.

SHERRY SONTAG: One of the problems the cable tapping missions had was not the difficulty in the dives or the difficulty in creating a cable tap. But how do you keep the submarine still underwater? Halibut had two anchors, but during a storm, the waves got so bad that The Halibut was basically rocking on these tethers and slamming down on the seafloor. 

NARRATOR: The divers were trapped outside, unable to climb back in. The crew hears awful snaps as the anchors break and Halibut starts drifting toward the surface in broad daylight. The divers wouldn’t have time to decompress. If they cut themselves loose, they would suffocate. The order of “flood it” is shouted. The valves open and she takes on tons of water. She crashes into the sand, and the rocks crunch against her hull. The crew can’t imagine they’ll make it home. They weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. But the storm recedes, and an emergency blow of the ballast tanks lifts her off the floor. The crew gather themselves, collect the tapes and, uneventfully and silently, travel home. Bradley gets word from the NSA almost immediately. The Beast has recorded as many as 20 lines at once, some of which carry conversations about sensitive missile tests. This is the big one.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The actual Soviet admiral's reports about how the tests went that were being sent back to Moscow would go through these cables. Ultimately the cables yielded information about where the Soviet submarines would go and hide if there was a nuclear war that broke out. 

NARRATOR: The eavesdropping on the traffic between senior Soviet officers and field commanders provided insight into operational tactics, strategic plans, logistics, and even maintenance problems. This changes everything. The US learns about the defects with Soviet submarines that make them easier to trail. Their nuclear fleet is suffering many failures, and some subs couldn’t sail due to a lack of spare parts. But most importantly, they now know if a nuclear first strike is on the cards. 

SHERRY SONTAG: This mission was called Operation Ivy Bells. 

NARRATOR: Captain James Bradley goes on to plan more of these missions, as more subs were refitted to follow Halibut’s path and install cable taps in the Barents Sea, as well as the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Over 10 years, more and more lines were tapped, revealing enemy tactics, their plans, the size of their arsenal, and how often they spoke to their mothers and loved ones. But much like the ebb and flow of the sea, the advantage one gains shifts like the waves. In this game, there’s no such thing as a permanent asset.

NARRATOR: In 1977, the cable tap missions have been running for six years, as Jimmy Carter becomes the 39th American president. A year later, he’s briefed by a man called Richard L. Haver.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: So Rich Haver was an intelligence official and he was heavily involved in the submarine spying. In a way, he was in part a successor to Captain Bradley.

NARRATOR: He tells President Carter all about the wiretaps, the submarine missions, and the plans to expand the wiretapping into more seas. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: So Rich Haver was a fantastic briefer. 

NARRATOR: The president signs them off. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Because ultimately every submarine mission that went inside Soviet waters, the president had to approve it in advance. So they needed to brief each president as he came in on what was going on and get his specific permission. Carter had been on a nuclear submarine briefly before his dad died, and he had to go home and run the family peanut farm. So he's asking about nuclear reactors and he's fascinated by everything. 

NARRATOR: Officer Haver tells him everything he knows. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He was crucial in figuring out the Soviet submarines and nuclear missiles were getting good enough and the missiles had much longer ranges than they had had in the ‘60s. They were a lot less vulnerable than in the earlier days when they had to go out in the Atlantic Ocean to be able to target Washington or New York. And there was a big debate within Naval intelligence about whether this was a big strategy change on the Soviets' part and did it put the US at a big disadvantage and negate a lot of the US superiority in submarine technology?

NARRATOR: Haver is suspicious about leaks. Something isn’t adding up. The new series of enemy subs are much quieter, and the technology is now as good as the Americans’. The Soviets then move their missiles closer to their coasts. Some are moved to the impenetrable shroud of the Arctic ice. It’s an unfamiliar landscape to the Americans. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Why are the Soviets changing their behavior? It's almost as if they know what we're going to do or what our advantage is, and they're trying to negate it.

NARRATOR: The Americans now calculate a missile could land in Washington, D.C. within 30 minutes of the call being made. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The US Navy would be planning an exercise and a Soviet submarine would show up in the middle of it or be sitting there waiting, which had never happened before. 

NARRATOR: The tapes keep coming, and US intelligence realizes that some of the information collected by human agents on the ground has been dead wrong. The tap recordings chronicled the dispersal of key Soviet ships and subs and offered a new picture of the state of Soviet readiness. Suddenly, Soviet boats are seen right over the cable tap site in the Sea of Okhotsk. They know. In 1981, Ronald Reagan becomes president. He’s briefed by Haver and is amazed. 

SHERRY SONTAG: By the time Ronald Reagan was in office, he was using words like ‘evil empire’. And he had the Soviets convinced that he was preparing the American public to see them as non-human, to see them as just the enemy, so he could justify a first strike. 

NARRATOR: Haver hands in a report to his superiors, dated January 30, 1982, his 37th birthday. He calculates a leak on the Atlantic side of the operations and a leak on the Pacific side. He’s met with skepticism. Surely nobody could compromise one of the most secure spying operations ever conceived? The report is ignored. He goes about his business briefing presidents. So, how did the Soviets learn about the tap site? Two years earlier, in 1980, the USS Seawolf is down at the tap site, collecting tapes, and attempting to weather another turbulent storm. 

SHERRY SONTAG: One of the problems the cable-tapping missions had was not the difficulty in the dives or the difficulty in creating a cable tap. But how do you keep the submarine still underwater? Later the US developed these like skegs, they call them - think of sled legs for the submarines to sit on the floor. 

NARRATOR: Man-made technology is no match for the raw and brutal power of the sea. The submariners brace themselves against the roiling currents. Death is in the water, and discovery awaits on the surface. These are not good options.

SHERRY SONTAG: The Seawolf started to rock on these skegs, and it started to dig itself in and indeed it went down so low that it ended up taking in rocks and sand inside the boat, through these intakes. Any kind of dramatic emergency blow move could have brought them to the surface. They would have been caught. They would have been seen. 

NARRATOR: The Seawolf is landing on the cable. There are fears the nuclear reactor may shut down with all the mud and sand it’s taking on. It could also be causing interference down the line; even worse, it could be breaking it in two. Seawolf is stuck. The self-destruct boxes are discussed as an option to scuttle - or purposefully sink - the ship and her crew.

SHERRY SONTAG: Shortly after this near - what was literally a near-death experience - the Soviets found the cable tap. They went almost to the exact right spot. They lifted the tap up and in case they had any question as to who had left it there, one of the parts inside the tap actually said ‘Property of the United States’. 

NARRATOR: One of the taps eventually ends up in a museum in Moscow, but how had the Soviets caught up so quickly with the Americans, both technologically and tactically? The Seawolf is blamed for them finding the tap. It must have caused enough damage for the Soviets to investigate. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Well, as it turned out, they had a little help catching up. 

NARRATOR: Seawolf is able to weather the storm, and when the seas are calm she escapes with her hull and crew intact but Haver’s suspicions had been right all along.

SHERRY SONTAG: It turned out it really wasn't The Seawolf at all. It was a spy.

NARRATOR: Haver does some digging and sees something extraordinary.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The Soviet ship that found the cable taps had actually left a base in the Baltic Sea way over by Europe, and gone around the below South America and come a long, long way like it was trying to mask its journey before The Seawolf had fallen on the cable. 

NARRATOR: If the Russian ship had already been en-route to the tap before The Seawolf’s near-death experience at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, something else must have tipped them off.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: So that's when Haver knew it was a spy for sure. 

NARRATOR: The Seawolf and her crew were relieved of any responsibility for the collapse of Operation Ivy Bells. That dubious honor rests with one man alone. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Ronald Pelton was an NSA analyst who had gotten into financial trouble. 

NARRATOR: Ronald Pelton had been at the National Security Agency for 44 years, the very place where all the tapes retrieved from the missions were analyzed and stored.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: He called the Soviet Embassy in Washington and said he had information for them and he ultimately, for $35,000, sold them the location of the cable tap in the Sea of Okhotsk. What a bargain. 

NARRATOR: He speaks to a man called Vitaly Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB colonel. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Yurchenko was working in this Soviet Embassy in Washington when Pelton called and said, “I have information for you.” 

NARRATOR: Yurchenko defects to the Americans in 1985 and starts handing over what he knows - including his knowledge of Pelton. The US routinely tapes all the phone calls coming in and out of the Soviet Embassy. And they went back and found the tape of that call and played the tape for people at the NSA. And they all said, “That's Ronald Pelton.” You can't make it up. In an attempt to mask his own bankruptcy, Ronald Pelton had exposed the nation’s most critical submarine spy missions and risked the lives of 100 men. When he’s arrested, the Navy finally turns over Haver’s old report to the Senate Intelligence Committee - the one he’d written in January 1982 outlining his suspicions of the two spies. They’re furious that the report was held back. The other tap in the Barents Sea is still secure, as Pelton’s job and security clearances hadn’t stretched that far. He was tried under the Espionage Act of 1917. The penalty could be death. Pelton pleaded not guilty. He’s given three consecutive life sentences, plus 10 years. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Officer Haver’s ignored report also detailed something else.

SHERRY SONTAG: And when Rick Haver - all that time ago - had thought, “I think there's not just one spy, I think there's two,” he was absolutely right. 

NARRATOR: The US spy agencies are unraveling, and the advantage the US believed that they had is being washed away. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: They had a spy, Johnnie Walker. The US submariners called him ‘Johnnie Walker Red’ after he was caught. But from 1967 into the 1980s, he and his confederates were handing the Soviets technical manuals about US submarines. 

NARRATOR: John Walker retired in 1976. He’s caught in 1985 after Richard Haver is handed a note. It’s from the FBI, and they’re speaking to Barbara Walker, John’s wife. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: The Walker Spy Ring was considered the most important one in the Soviet Union, all that they had given them to negate the US advantage at sea. 

NARRATOR: Walker has been living the good life, and his quiet post-retirement detective agency isn’t justifying the spending. Barbara draws the line at him recruiting his daughter into his spy ring and reports him.

SHERRY SONTAG: The reason we lost the ability to trail Soviet subs with impunity is the spy, Johnny Walker, let the Soviets know just how loud they were and how frequently we were following them. The Soviets pulled back their subs to their shores. 

NARRATOR: This explains why the US was surprised in the waters by the new ships and new tactics, as well as the Russian retreat to the Arctic. All told, two spies and one defector spell the end of Operation Ivy Bells. Back on dry land, in 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan are in Reykjavik, thrashing out a deal to wind down their nuclear arms by 50 percent. As this is happening, the USS Parche is held in place above a cable tap near the Arctic to retrieve tapes and lay down fresh ones. She waits two weeks. No agreement is reached. The Parche moves forward into the 12-mile coastal line and collects a huge amount of data from the tap. Afterward, Reagan wants to meet her captain.

CHRISTOPHER DREW: Reagan tells him, “You're a modern-day John Wayne,” the American cowboy actor. And the crew figured that was probably true since Reagan had known John Wayne.

NARRATOR: In 1986 and 1987, Soviet subs were pulled home but on the US side it’s business as usual. The technology got better and the pace of operations didn’t let up. Just as the Soviets had finally learned to construct subs as good as the Americans, they were running out of money to build and operate them. In time, the Soviet Union dissolves and tensions thaw. Their concerns move closer to home. There will be no first strike. Top officials at the CIA would acknowledge that cable tapping was the most dangerous of any long-standing intelligence operation of the Cold War. It’s thought that the US carried out as many as 2,000 submarine missions in Soviet Union waters. Ultimately the cable taps contributed to more peaceful coexistence between the two nations.

SHERRY SONTAGIt was valuable to both sides because it took what were bumps in the night and the potential for overreacting and it humanized the issues and it humanized the fear the US was causing. And it gave everybody a chance to understand that they needed to step back. It was luck that nobody panicked and hit the button first.

NARRATOR: James Bradley never heard a single minute of the tapes. He’d imagined the cable, envisioned the signs on the coast, and labored to get the funding and clearances, but the NSA deemed he hadn’t earned enough currency to actually listen to them. The cable taps helped prevent nuclear war. Closer to home, the submariners recognized their Soviet counterparts as equals. After all, the Russians phone home to wish their mothers Happy Birthday too. They ask their partners to wait for them too. They lead incredibly similar lives. Despite the illegality, the piracy, the brazen nerve, and the bare-faced audacity of the Americans and the missions, the two sides eventually sail away from the troubled waters of turmoil and conflict. And it all started with a daydream. 

CHRISTOPHER DREW: I've certainly never heard of another intelligence operation of this magnitude that ever started in quite that way. 

NARRATOR: I’m Sophia Di Martino. Join us next week for the story of a journalist who became the unsuspecting target of spies behind the Iron Curtain.