About book Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage (2000)
Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew put together a great book telling previously untold stories of the heroes who defended the United States underwater during the Cold War. These sailors didn’t have their story told before for various reasons. First, the Cold War had no battles in the traditional sense there is no Yorktown or Gettysburg for people to make movies about. Their battles were espionage by cable taping and sub shadowing. Second, everything was classified. Their stories could not be told without endangering further operations. This book shows the good with the bad and the tragedy with the glory of the silent service.The tragedy of course is the loss of life, when ships were lost at sea with all hands aboard. If a surface ship sinks there is a chance you might survive, however, if the submarine goes down you are already underwater and you are doomed. Unless of course you are on the Cochino, then you might survive.One of the more interesting subjects to read about was the loss of the Scorpion. When the book talks about how Dr. John Craven’s investigation made conclusions about its loss it presents a most dramatic scene. That scene is the part of the investigation that placed Lt. Commander Fountain, the former executive officer of the Scorpion, to act as captain in the simulator.“Chills shot through Craven when he saw the results. By now, he and several others attending this test were nearly certain they had replicated the Scorpion’s loss. No one told that to Fountain. No one told him he had just possibly enacted the circumstances that led to the deaths of the men he had once helped to command. Maybe nobody had to tell him. He left the simulator without asking any questions, without saying a word.” (p.146)After a forty-five year Cold War American submarines had developed a whole culture of brinkmanship with the Soviets. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, which was great for the United States because we won the Cold War. However the submarine fleet was short of purpose. Of course this book ends in the 1990s I think in the last decade they probably have found a new purpose and mission.There is also the tails of their many victories. The book is called Blind Man’s Bluff after a line in a ballad written by a submariner named Tommy Cox in honor of his captain. Captain Whitey Mack reminds me of a real life Captain Kirk, except he operated beneath the waves as oppose to up in space. This daring captain once shadowed a soviet sub for its entire cruise.“In fact, everything about this thirty-seven-year-old commander was big. His towering, 240-pound frame didn’t quite fit though Lapon’s low hatches and narrow passageways, and he was almost always bent over in the control room, littered overhead with a maze of piping and wire. Submarines were just too small to contain Whitey Mack. He was a larger-than-life renegade, much like the heroes in the novels he devoured by the basketful. He saw himself as the hero in a story he was writing as he went along, a story ruled by his own tactics and sometimes by his own rules.” (p.174)”After a forty-five year Cold War, American submarines had developed a whole culture of brinkmanship with the Soviets. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, which was great for the United States because we won the Cold War. However the submarine fleet was left short of purpose. Of course this book ends in the 1990s, I think in the last decade they probably have found a new purpose and mission.
Here we have the exemplary stories of the use of submarines in the cold war as spying devices for the soviets. Undergriding this story is a celebration of American rationality and ingenuity in the face of bureaucracies and their financial vehicles in attempting to control cost. There is also no small celebration of the key heros in this story as they attempt to do what is right for the American people. It's interesting this was matched by the Soviet's ability to infiltrate American society and get their own spy ring, collecting American secrets through good 'ole fashioned spying than as Americans had with their tech.This book does some good at separating the seamanship from the politics, as it tries to tell the Soviet side and relate it to the American side. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, we see a struggle of the Navy on both sides to keep their budgets by justifying it through each other's armaments. I suppose if we take the lesson seriously, it would be that institutional inertia counts more for technological innovation than political needs. Often though, as with intelligence agencies and the military the three are intertwined although we may seek to find one "running the show" more than the other two. Strangely, this book, in taking the military's point of view for the individuals who risk their lives as uncelebrated heros for the intelligence community, would also point out much of the interference of the navy came from the intelligence community's attempts to ask for the impossible. Not understanding tech and its current situation limits tech as much as it grows it.There is no real sense of progress that can be found as production is neutral to progress even as progress relies on production.All in all, an entertaining book to read, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was able to be more patriotic. But in a way the America and USSR of the cold war era is a different world/America than the one I know now. Information wars today are played out in a different field than one of submarines tapping phone lines. It's much more likely this tapping would be done through internet servers than anything else. One day we will get a book on hackers working for the government.That would be a very interesting read, much more than this, although the glimpse into this disappearing world has also been of great interest.
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I find the story interesting having lived through some aspects of it long ago as a submariner. Nice to know what might have been going on in the forward section of the boat while I spent my time in the after section in engineering. However, I'm taking some of these stories with a grain of salt since it appears that some of them have been "peached" up according to some Amazon reviewers.As to the fate of the Scorpion, the authors leave us baffled regarding the causes; first they relate a Navy analyst’s elaborate "hot run" theory and then introduce some new information from another analyst’s i.e. "warhead burn off" that takes us down an alternate path without recognizing and resolving the contradiction as to the unexpected location of the wreck.The storyline dealt primarily with the intelligence gathering aspect which was a secondary function of the nuclear submarine service's primary goal of active nuclear deterrence. The swashbuckling "can do" one upsmanship attitude of the commanding officer’s involved actually added grist to the adage that military intelligence is an oxymoron. The thoughtful reader might takes this as a cautionary tale of how unchecked brinkmanship at lower levels of command in the intelligence community can lead to disaster and enormous wastefulness of resources with small consideration of the risks involved.
—Edward
I really enjoyed the first 200 pages or so, then it turned into a real snoozer. If it weren't for the initial interesting stories and pictures, I'd have given this only two stars. As it now stands I haven't read past page 200 because the joy of reading this book disappeared about 30 pages ago and it seems like the snoozefest is only going to continue. Since stopping about a week ago I have read another two books so I know the issue isn't with my desire to read, it's with my desire to continue reading this book. How does it end? I don't know and after suffering through the last 30 pages, I don't care. - written on my Iphone
—James
I served a couple of years in missile submarines (SAM HOUSTON, HENRY L STIMSON) in the mid-1960's. At the time, and for most of the many years since, I could say practically nil about the fascinating technology we worked with, and the (often all-too-) exciting tactical situations we got involved in. This book presents an accurate, objective picture of the submarine Cold War of those days. A young radioman once came to me, troubled by the thought of unleashing Armageddon if the day ever came. He asked me, "What's the point of killing even more people? If we're ordered to fire, it'll be 'cause our families are already gone." Sounding more sanguine than I felt, I said, "We're patrolling out here to forestall any stupid first-strike, while 'men of good will' work out some other way for us all to live together." Well, the inexorable realities of economics finally finished the Soviet empire, not 'men of good will;' but I take pride in having helped prevent some nuclear madness in the meantime. This is a good book; you can believe what it says.
—Bill W.
