Product Description

Blind Man's "Bluff meets The Hunt for Red October" in the shocking untold story of an American submarine torpedoed at the height of the Cold War - and the forty year cover-up that followed.One Navy admiral called it "one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era." To this day, the U.S. Navy officially calls it an inexplicable accident. But a small handful of Navy leaders, submariners and intelligence officials from that era have long known otherwise: that the loss of the USS Scorpion (SSN 589) and its crew of 99 men on May 22, 1968, was an act of war. The Scorpion was sunk by a Soviet sub in an act of reprisal for the sinking of the Soviet missile sub K-129, which had gone down in the Pacific just ten weeks before.The Scorpion sinking is not a mystery; it is a Cold War secret that has been buried by both the U.S. and Soviet governments since 1968. At the time, both sides quickly realized that the back-to-back submarine sinkings - if publicly known - could have turned the Cold War into a hot war overnight.For nearly 40 years, the Navy and U.S. intelligence communities have continued to cover up the facts of the Scorpion sinking, citing the need to protect top secret military classification. The full account of its loss has continued to elude and frustrate researchers, journalists and family members of the lost crew - until now.After a quarter century of research, this book is the first to tell the story of what actually happened to the ninety-nine members of the U.S. Navy's elite Submarine Service who disappeared in the service of their country to a watery grave on the ocean floor 11,100 feet down. It reveals that the Navy's official Scorpion story - from the sub's failure to make port to a frantic open-ocean hunt, to a scientific search that ultimately "found" the wreckage, to a Court of Inquiry's carefully-crafted conclusions - was all a lie.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118502 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
Ed Offley has been a military reporting specialist for newspapers and online publications since 1981, including the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Virginia, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Stripes.com, and DefenseWatch magazine. He is currently Military Reporter for the News Herald in Panama City, Florida. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Offley served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He lives in Florida.

Customer Reviews

A Bodyguard of Lies?
After nearly 25 years of researching the loss of the USS Scorpion, Ed Offley offers a detailed theory of what happened to the submarine and why. He theorizes that the Soviets were outraged by the March 1968 loss of their K-129 missle boat, which they believed sank after a collision with an aggressive US attack submarine. Because of the secrets betrayed by the Walker spy ring and the encryption equipment lost in the North Korean seizure of the Pueblo in January 1968, the Soviets were able to determine the mission, course and location of the Scorpion. When the Navy ordered the Scorpion to spy on a group of Soviet surface ships near the Canary Islands, a Soviet submarine began a game of cat and mouse that escalated into a dogfight between the two boats. At some point, for reasons unknown, the Soviet submarine fired a torpedo that sank the Scorpion.

Offley claims that the US Navy knew that the Scorpion had been torpedoed almost immediately after it was lost on May 22, 1968, either because the Russians promptly told the US in an effort to manage an international crisis or because the Navy was able to use its SOSUS network to determine immediately the cause and the location of the sinking. According to Offley, the Navy secretly began to search for the Scorpion even before it was declared overdue in Norfolk and had located the wreckage by early June 1968, not in October 1968 as was officially reported.

The purpose of all this subterfuge was to prevent a major incident from escalating into a full-scale war. The world was a very tense place in May 1968--the Vietnam War was in full swing and the United States and the Soviet Union were confronting each other throughout the world. Both sides agreed to bury the truth rather than to fight over it.

Perhaps. Winston Churchill once said that "in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." It may be that cool heads in both Russia and the United States decided that lying was better than admitting what had happened.

Still, while Offley's arguments are intriguing, they are not compelling. The logic seems to run like this: a number of people (Russian and American) have said things or seen things indicating that the Scorpion was in fact torpedoed by a Russian sub. Some of those people are anonymous, others are being quoted at one remove, others claim to have seen evidence that is no longer available (for example, a SOSUS recording of the torpedo attack), and others seem to be confirming a traditon in the American submarine service that the Russians sunk the Scorpion. Offley concludes that all these sources must be correct, and that therefore anything in the official reports that is inconsistent with this testimony must be the result of a coverup at the highest levels.

He might be right, but the evidence remains circumstantial. "Scorpion Down" doesn't offer a "smoking gun" report from the US or Soviet Navy saying "a Russian torpedo sank the Scorpion." Likewise, the book doesn't provide testimony from any crew member from the Russian submarine that would have fired the torpedo or from any of the surface vessels that were in the vicinity. And if the Soviets had shown a willingness to use deadly force to get Americans to back off from their activities, why did the US Navy keep pursuing aggressive submarine tactics and specifically refuse to limit those tactics in the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement?

It could be that a rogue commander got carried away and fired a torpedo; perhaps there was a collision between two subs engaged in an aggressive game of cat and mouse; perhaps we'll never know--or perhaps the definitive archive will soon be opened to give us the answer.

In the meantime, "Scorpion Down" is a page turner and well worth reading. I am not convinced by the author's conclusions, but he writes a gripping story. I recommend reading this book together with Stephen Johnson's "Silent Steel," which is a little drier and much less sensational than "Scorpion Down" but takes the reader much closer to the challenges of operating a high performance attack sub and the courage of those who do it.

The not so cold war beneath the seas.
This work highlights an episode of the cold war which suddenly became very hot for the USSN Scorpion in the Atalntic at the hands of the Soviet Navy and the remarkable coner up, covering years and years by both the Kremlin and Washington. An excellent read.