Operation Ivy Bells

Foreword

Foreword to the First Edition

For nearly a half-century, one of the greatest sagas of the sea has remained an untold story – until now. At the height of the Cold War, a small and elite group of U.S. Navy nuclear submariners and deep-sea divers pulled off one of the most ambitions clandestine intelligence-gathering operations in history.

Using the converted nuclear submarine USS Halibut as an operating platform, a team of Navy divers, sometime in the early 1970s, was able to place a wiretapping pod around a Soviet military communications cable deep inside the Sea of Okhotsk. The pod successfully intercepted critical communications between the Soviet Pacific Fleet base at Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy and other bases on the mainland including Vladivostok and Magadan. On a second mission, the team was able to deploy a massive six-ton, plutonium-powered replacement pod that sucked up Soviet communications for months at a time. Despite disclosure of that particular operation a decade later by a turncoat inside the National Security Agency, the diver-spies and their nuclear submarine brethren continued to carry out similar missions elsewhere well into the 1990s – and probably beyond.

Operation Ivy Bells, as the initial mission was called, comprised more than a feat of silent stealth beneath the waves. It was also an incredible accomplishment of a daring – and dangerous – submergence technique known as saturation diving. Navy deep-sea divers “pressed” down to depths of several hundred feet in a pressure chamber attached to the Halibut’s hull, breathing an exotic gas mixture of helium (which replaced nitrogen that would become toxic to the human body at these depths) and a small amount of oxygen (since the normal amount of oxygen would also become toxic at these depths). They were able to operate at depths far beyond the maximum for ordinary deep-sea gear and scuba tanks. The intelligence they gathered played a major part in America’s Cold War victory.

News reports since the Cold War ended have occasionally hinted at the barest outlines of Operation Ivy Bells and subsequent missions, but revealed few details of what it was actually like for a Navy diver to risk capture or death while planting a sensor pod or retrieving Soviet missile nosecone fragments literally under the feet of the Cold War adversary. In July 2000, Puget Soundings, a newsletter of the United States Submarine Veterans Bremerton Base, inadvertently let slip one new marker of just how important the sailors of USS Halibut – another spy sub, USS Seawolf, and later spy subs USS Parche, and USS Jimmy Carter – were to America’s Cold War efforts. Two of the guest speakers at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Bremerton, Washington, were former CIA Director Robert Gates, and world-famous techno-thriller novelist Tom Clancy. In remarks to the reunion of Parche sailors – the descendants two decades later of the Halibut team – Clancy stated, “The point of the (U.S. Navy’s) lance killed the (Soviet) dragon … and you were the point of the lance.” Gates went even further, praising the veterans for all their efforts, where “every mission (was) a life-and-death mission…. I know who you are and I know what you did, and I am honored to be here with you tonight.”

Thanks to Robert Williscroft, those interested in Cold War history can now relive the missions of the Halibut and its dedicated crew as they undertook two daring operations to penetrate Soviet military communications and to retrieve vital physical evidence of the Soviet missile program. While this book is a novel, with composite characters and some events compiled from stories from former colleagues, it is far from a totally fictional account. As a young Navy officer, Williscroft served both as a nuclear submariner and later became involved as a saturation diver with the Navy’s Submarine Development Group One, which carried out the daring spy missions deep inside Soviet waters. Much of Operation Ivy Bells comes from Williscroft’s own experiences, or that of his close comrades.

You won’t be able to put this book down!

Ed Offley

Panama City Beach, Florida

August 2014

Ed Offley is author of Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon – the Untold Story of the USS Scorpion, and several books about the Battle of the Atlantic, most recently The Burning Shore: How Hitler’s U-boats Brought World War II to America.

Foreword to the Second Edition

The first edition of Operation Ivy Bells became a bestseller. Since then Dr. Williscroft has written several more novels. He found that inserting sub-chapter headings made the action easier to follow, so when Fresh Ink Group proposed to produce a revised second edition of Operation Ivy Bells, we decided to follow that example.

Each chapter contains one or more sub-headings that indicate the location of the action: Inside Halibut and where the sub is, divers on the sea floor at some location, divers on land at some location, etc. Hopefully these changes will make Operation Ivy Bells even more enjoyable.

Remember that Operation Ivy Bells is also available as an ebook and audio book.

Fresh Ink Group

Guntersville, Alabama

July 2019