http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/sc...pagewanted=all

Queenfish: A Cold War Tale

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 18, 2008 - New York Times

Atop the globe, the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean has remained
relatively peaceful. But its depths have boiled with intrigue, no more
so than in the cold war.

Although the superpowers planned to turn those depths into an inferno
of exploding torpedoes and rising missiles, the brotherhood of
submariners — the silent service, both Russian and American — has
worked hard over the decades to keep the particulars of those plans
hush-hush.

Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of
silence, revealing some of the science and spying that went into the
doomsday preparations.

A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine,
the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the
Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a
clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic submarine operations and to
win any military showdown with the Soviet Union.

In great secrecy, moving as quietly as possible below treacherous ice,
the Queenfish, under the command of Captain Alfred S. McLaren, mapped
thousands of miles of previously uncharted seabed in search of safe
submarine routes. It often had to maneuver between shallow bottoms and
ice keels extending down from the surface more than 100 feet,
threatening the sub and the crew of 117 men with ruin.

Another danger was that the sub might simply be frozen in place with
no way out and no way to call for help as food and other supplies
dwindled.

The Queenfish at one point became stuck in a dead end. The rescue took
an hour and tense backtracking out of what had threatened to become an
icy tomb.

“I still dream about it every other week,” Dr. McLaren, 75, the book’s
author, recalled in an interview. “It was hairy.” The University of
Alabama Press is publishing his recollections of the secret voyage.

Sylvia A. Earle, an oceanographer and the former chief scientist of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said such feats
in perilous waters made Dr. McLaren a genuine hero. “The sub could
have disappeared, and nobody would have known anything about it,” she
said. “But they came through. That’s exploration at its most
exquisite.”

After Dr. McLaren’s mission, the Arctic became a theater of military
operations in which the Soviets tried to hide their missile-carrying
subs under the fringes of the ice pack while American attack subs
tried relentlessly to track them. The goal was to destroy the Soviet
subs if the cold war turned hot, doing so quickly enough to keep them
from launching their missiles and nuclear warheads at the United
States.

Norman Polmar, an author and analyst on Navy operations, called the
polar environment “very very difficult” for subs. He said ice dangling
from the surface in endless shapes and sizes made the sub’s main eyes
— sonar beams that bounce sound off the bottom and surrounding objects
— work poorly.

Mr. Polmar added that the submarine community nonetheless considered
the Arctic “a big deal,” because it had a near monopoly on operations
there.

Dr. McLaren commanded one of the Navy’s most advanced warships, a
jet-black monster the length of a football field.

It was the first of a large class of submarines specially designed for
year-round operations in polar regions. As such, it boasted an array
of special acoustic gear meant to help it visualize the complex world
beneath the pack ice.

For instance, the sub had a special sensor to detect icebergs jutting
downward with threatening spikes. From bow to stern, it had a total of
seven acoustic sensors pointing upward to help the crew judge the
thickness of ice overhead.

As Dr. McLaren recounts in “Unknown Waters,” the Queenfish, in
preparation for its Arctic voyage, was stripped of all identifying
marks and picked up a full load of torpedoes.

It arrived at the North Pole on Aug. 5, 1970, rising through open
water. On the ice, an impromptu Santa Claus in a red suit frolicked
with crew members.

The submarine then sailed for the Siberian continental shelf, where it
began its mission of secret reconnaissance.

Moscow claimed seas extending 230 miles from its shores, including
most of the shelf, whose waters averaged a few hundred feet deep. But
Washington recognized just a 12-mile territorial limit, and Dr.
McLaren was instructed to play by those rules.

As the book recounts, the sub repeatedly ventured within periscope
range of Soviet land. In the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, its crew
examined the October Revolution and Bolshevik Islands.

The Queenfish also spotted a convoy. “I was able to see and identify
all six ships as Soviet,” Dr. McLaren writes. “They consisted of an
icebreaker leading a tanker and four cargo ships on an easterly course
that slowly weaved back and forth through the chaotic ice pack.”

The main mission was to map the seabed and collect oceanographic data
in anticipation of the Arctic’s becoming a major theater of military
operations. The sub did so by finding and following depth contours,
for instance, by locating the areas of the Arctic Basin where the
seabed was 600 feet below the surface. A result was a navigation chart
that bore the kind of squiggly lines found on topographic maps.

The goal of mapping the bottom contour also sent the Queenfish into
the dead end. The crew was watching a favorite Western movie, “Shane,”
when a messenger touched Dr. McLaren on the shoulder and whispered
that the sub had ground to a standstill.

“Heart in my mouth, I ran up to the after-port side of the control
room,” he writes. “Saturating the iceberg detector scope was bright
sea-ice-return in all directions.”

Dr. McLaren ordered all crew movement to cease as he and other watch
standers worked the propeller, rudder and stern planes to move the
Queenfish slowly backward. Finally, he writes, the boat entered deeper
water, and the crew “gave out a huge collective sigh of relief.”

The two-month voyage ended in Nome, Alaska, where the sub and crew
encountered a chilly reception. The mayor and other people on the town
dock had mistaken the sinister-looking sub without markings as Soviet.

In 1972, Dr. McLaren won the Distinguished Service Medal, the
military’s highest peacetime award.

Historians say cold war maneuvering in the Arctic picked up after his
mission, with the two sides deploying more submarines beneath the ice.
The United States built a total of 36 sister subs to the Queenfish,
known as the Sturgeon class.

Little is known publicly of the polar exploits. But every so often the
icy world erupted in a foretaste of war. In 1984, an American
satellite observed a Soviet sub breaking through the ice of the
Siberian sea to test fire missiles.

Military and legal experts said Dr. McLaren’s book, while providing a
glimpse into a hidden world of cold war planning, might also make
political waves today.

That is because of the sub’s repeated penetrations of what Moscow
considered its territorial waters, defying boundaries that Washington
refused to recognize. The disclosure of that boldness could bolster
the case in international forums for American navigational rights,
legal experts said in interviews.

Bernard H. Oxman, a specialist in maritime law at the University of
Miami School of Law, called the 1970 voyage “an indication of state
practice and a refusal to acquiesce in Russian claims over
navigation.” Although Moscow has in recent years relaxed such claims,
he added, the legal precedent remains.

So too, Dr. McLaren sees his spy mission as a milestone for freedom of
navigation, whether in Russian waters or elsewhere in the contested
wilds atop the globe.

Today the issue is hot, because melting polar ice is opening up new
shipping lanes and exposing potentially vast deposits of natural
resources, including oil. A modern gold rush is getting under way.

“It’s important to maintain freedom of the seas,” Dr. McLaren said in
an interview. “That’s something our country has fought for literally
from its inception.”

Global warming and the shrinking polar ice pack are creating new
opportunities and responsibilities, he said, adding, “We’ve got to
stand our ground.”