Cry from the Deep

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ramsey Flynn, the winner of a National Magazine Award for reporting and a former staff writer for the Washingtonian and chief editor of Baltimore magazine. He is the author of the new book Cry from the Deep: The Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test.

Flynn: Thank you for the honor of appearing at FrontPage and your interest in my new book.

Flynn: In August of 2000, just like so many other people, I was captivated by the first TV broadcasts reporting that a Russian sub was down and that trapped sailors appeared to be pounding on the hull hoping for a rescue. Then I heard that western navies were already preparing to join the rescue effort. I was excited at the idea that “former enemies” might pool their best resources to get these boys out alive. I thought it would be like the Apollo 13 story on an international scale – kind of a “global bonding” event.

I’m a career magazine journalist with good contacts among chief editors, and I quickly signaled a few of them about my interests in doing this one. Naturally, I thought it had a high likelihood of a positive outcome.

Then, as most folks remember, the story took a very dark turn as the Russian rescue efforts faltered and they refused to allow foreign rescuers until long after the tapping reports disappeared. It seemed as if the entire world turned gloomy at the reports that all 118 men were now dead. Though the story no longer had the possibility of a happy ending, I found the event’s surrounding mysteries too maddening to ignore. What the devil were the Russian officials thinking?

My friend Mark Bryant was editing Men’s Journal at the time, and he and I agreed that the story would still hold the world’s attention for years to come, so my wild reporting odyssey was launched.

FP: The Russian government is not well known for candor. How did you go about learning the truth?

Flynn: I’m a deep believer in the value of very intensive reporting. Over the next year I logged a number of trips to Russia and hundreds of interviews. The resulting magazine treatment broke a lot of ground and many folks considered it definitive for its time. I was slated to broadcast widely my preliminary findings on NBC’s Today Show as soon as the magazine copies went public. But the day we hit the stands was September 11, 2001, so my Today Show opportunity was naturally superseded.

But I quietly resumed the chase, and took one of the first flights to Moscow that post-September 11 weekend to launch the book phase of my project. I had to make two more reporting forays into Russia and formed a sharp little network of correspondents. We now had a very authoritative magazine piece with which to credential our efforts, and we kept wheedling until all the key doors opened.

Flynn: The constant flood of mounting conspiracy theories drove us nuts. It was damned hard to achieve provable truth with anything, as “the facts” felt like a constantly moving target. The whole process was exhausting, but I take some satisfaction in the belief that we’ve achieved the most “biblical account” of what really happened. That’s what I pledged to all of our sources, and I think the narrative carries the authority of very thorough reporting from the most credible sources.

More than a dozen other Kursk books have been written, and Cry From the Deep is the fourth and most recent in the English language. We got a lot of first-time interviews among senior Russian naval figures who participated in the events, and opened up many intrigues on the western side as well. The world hasn’t understood the early US and British actions very well – until now.

Flynn: First, the aforementioned western intrigues¼. Everyone knows the US was closely watching the Barents exercises with two submarines, but submarine operations are also famously secret. This longstanding reality helped fuel much of the conspiracy mongering. Many Russians, both immediately after the disaster and even now, still believe a western sub either rammed the Kursk or shot it with a torpedo when one of our subs accidentally strayed into the line of fire for the Kursk’s own torpedo practice; they claim the commander of the closest US sub, the USS Memphis, fired first in self-defense and then fled the scene.

The ones who say the US accidentally rammed the Kursk also say the Memphis was later seen “limping” toward a Norwegian naval base days later in serious need of repairs. These various conspiracy theorists further say that when presidents Clinton and Putin talked by phone later in the week, they forged an unholy quid pro quo in the interest of averting World War III. According to this theory, Clinton apologized to Putin and then offered to suspend all talk of a US nuclear missile shield that would have more completely nullified whatever military parity Russia thought it might have in a fight with its erstwhile Cold War foe.

The conspiracy theorists really figured they had their trifecta when then-CIA chief George Tenet visited Moscow in the week immediately following the disaster, ostensibly to button up the details of this purportedly unholy bargain.

If I could have proved any variation of these things to be true, I would have had quite the blockbuster on my hands. But the reporting undid all of these fundamental ideas quite handily, and nearly all of the principal sources are on the record. We’ve got three senior-level US sources cited as agreeing the Memphis was 25 miles away from the Kursk during its fatal blasts. (The most credible previous reports had all placed the Memphis at about 70 miles out).

As to the Norway visit, I interviewed senior Norwegian officials in Oslo, and they told me the Memphis had scheduled its port call back in May of that year. They also said that later requests by Russian media to photograph the Memphis in port were accommodated by Norwegian officials, though no Russian media outlets availed themselves of the opportunity.

The CIA’s Tenet had also been scheduled for his visit months in advance, and the man he had dinner with on his first night in Moscow was one of my best sources, US Embassy Naval Attache Captain Robert Brannon. Brannon told me the Kursk tragedy only came up in conversation in the most incidental fashion.

And then to the purported secret deal between the two presidents: One of my other best sources was the senior official from the National Security Council who acted as the point man and translator in that very phone call. His name is Mark Medish, and all of his accounts in every other aspect of his involvement in the western response to the tragedy have checked out perfectly.

I also had a handful of not-for-attribution talks with men who were aboard the Memphis for this whole affair, and they confirm the portrayal in the book. It’s all just a bit too obvious that the Americans had no relationship to the causes of this disaster, though many zealous Russian nationalists won’t let go of this belief. This despite the fact that all of the alleged early reports of “parts of a foreign submarine” that were purportedly found along the seabed near the wreck site seemed to evaporate one by one.

This is not to say that I didn’t find magnificent candor from many delightful Russian naval men and wreck investigators. We’ve developed a wealth of exclusive details that vividly place our readers amidst the scene. We even include never-before-published radio and intercom dialogues from aboard the Kursk in the days and hours leading up to its demise.

One of the most startling revelations of the radio dialogues is that we get actual snippets of a fire drill aboard the Kursk just one day prior to its wreck. The detail that makes this truly stunning is that they practice a very similar scenario of what was about to come. To wit: The Kursk commander told his men the “fire” in this fire drill had disabled the entire command and control center, and that they would have to figure out how to deal with that scenario. Well that’s precisely what happened the next day.

FP: Cry From the Deep clears the West as a suspect in the Kursk disaster’s cause. What can it tell us about America’s policy toward Russia in general?

Flynn: One of the other areas of the book’s new revelations are some of the less-than-stellar behaviors of the West’s earliest responses, or lack thereof. While I’d like to think of myself as shy of adding to the great global fashion trend of America-bashing, I think US policy needs some revision regarding incidents like this.

The US response was, to put it bluntly, not as universally high-minded as previously portrayed. It’s long been understood that US surveillance systems detected the Kursk’s deadly blasts the moment they happened, and that American analysts figured out their significance within an hour. The US folks shared this understanding with their British counterparts almost immediately and the news that a Russian nuclear submarine had exploded in the Barents Sea went rapidly to the top of their governments.

So ¼ why didn’t we say hello to the Russians right away? The Cold War had been over for 10 years by August of 2000, and the Clinton Administration was trying to lure a struggling post-Soviet Russia into the community of free nations. Wouldn’t the supposed “neighbors” in this new community readily share knowledge that one of their billion-dollar weapons systems with an untold number of people on board was in big trouble and that we can pinpoint its location?

CFD documents that a small meeting involving senior representatives of the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon had a quick strategy session over the news that Saturday morning. The Pentagon official and one of the State Department folks strongly urged against initiating any contact with the Russians over this, for reasons that can only be attributed to a bilateral perpetuation of Cold War postures.

To his credit, NSC chief Sandy Berger strongly disagreed. It has been previously unreported, until now, that Berger made a quick attempt to discreetly contact his Russian counterpart ASAP. But after Berger’s call was mysteriously rebuffed, why didn’t Bill Clinton pick up the phone and rattle Vladimir Putin’s cage?

The context here is both crucial and tragic. Russia’s government still hated NATO, and especially the U.S., and was particularly rankled by NATO’s bombing over the Balkans the previous year. So their major naval exercise in the summer of 2000 was an attempt to show the US that Russia could still blast the daylights out of a significant portion of the US military should American might ever begin to casually disregard this former superpower. It was this Russian posture with the exercise that helped the trenchant American Cold Warriors argue so persuasively against early initiative, and it’s on this point where I question American foreign policy. Russia has a right to flex its naval muscles, but think about how disarming it would have been if these purportedly “evil yanks” had called a time-out to the well-known spying game in the Barents Sea in the interest of offering humanitarian assistance? Talk about ‘loving your enemies’! We could have disarmed a lot of the residual East-West tensions.

As it turned out, we can all recall the international fuss raised over the delay in rescue efforts even as the on-site reports of desperate tapping sounds rising from the seabed began to fade. Well here’s a newsflash – in their zeal to maintain operational security, the US aided and abetted those delayed rescue efforts.

And it gets worse. When Defense Secretary William Cohen was alerted to the unfolding disaster that Saturday morning, August 12, he was at home. The Marine colonel who called him told me that Cohen was in “receive mode” regarding the information, and issued no orders at all. This passive silence was replicated with our British partners as well. Both the US and Brits have the finest sub rescue technology in the world, and the professionals associated with these rescue teams would have been itching to help in any way they could. But now the whole world can know that they were not alerted in any way, shape or form – for two days. The rescue chiefs from both countries told me they learned of the disaster the same way the rest of the world did – through the news media, 48 hours after the fact.

Flynn: In the most simple terms, from the explosion of a giant torpedo in one of the Kursk’s forward tubes. The Russians were using an unstable oxidizer in their fuel mix that the West had almost unanimously rejected more than 30 years earlier because it was found to be way too volatile. The oxidizer in this case was high-test hydrogen peroxide, which decomposes when it comes into contact with many elements that are all too common in torpedo rooms – like oil, grease, rags, and even some of the metals used in the equipment.

The irony is that this giant torpedo didn’t even have a warhead. But the initial blast was so intense that it sprayed heavy shrapnel into other nearby weapons fuel tanks and even warheads, which prompted the more truly catastrophic blasts that sealed the Kursk’s fate.

This sequence is vividly detailed in the book, and there’s obviously a whole lot more to why it happened. Because of all the skepticism surrounding the tragedy’s cause, my team and I really focused quite intensely on all of this aspect. We broke a whole lot of new ground here, including some very clear evidence that the Kursk captain knew well in advance that this notoriously temperamental torpedo was a very dangerous handful for his inexperienced torpedo team.

One of the reasons I thought it was so important to report this sequence so intensively is that I’ve come to like the Kursk tragedy as a parallel event to the JFK assassination in the US. Though the Kursk disaster is now considered a relatively small bit of history in the West, it resounds very deeply in the Russian psyche. I have always hated the fact that we in the West will be forever haunted by the “grassy knoll” problems that plague the JFK case. I suspect that if I’d been a journalist back then, I’d like to think I would have tackled those mysteries before the case went cold. But with the Kursk disaster, I’d like to think we’ve removed any possibility of grassy knolls haunting the Russians.

FP: Your book also tracks the rising authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia in the Kursk disaster’s wake. How do you think this will affect the War on Terror?

Flynn: I think it only further hampers Russia’s ability to be an effective ally on this front.

One of the things I think few of us in the West can understand is that the Russian people have had a lousy encounter with things they’ve come to associate with “democracy.” For them it has mostly meant social collapse and a rise in organized crime and a general sensation of chaos. So this has made the Russian people more amenable to Putin’s heavy-handed moves, and he’s maintained an impressively high popularity rating in public opinion polls.

But some of his latest crackdown attempts strike me as counterproductive. So much of the Islamic extremism that threatens Russia arises from the transcaucasus regions in and around Chechnya. The reason Putin won’t let Chechnya break away is because he feels it’ll unleash a domino effect throughout these border countries. But by taking more control over their local elections, Putin will likely only stoke a greater resentment in these areas that Russian domination will feel like the Soviet-era iron fist that so much of the world has rejected. I think this is all a recipe for further stoking the cauldron of Islamic radicalism.

That is a good article, but I'd argue a little with this statement...
"Well here’s a newsflash – in their zeal to maintain operational security, the US aided and abetted those delayed rescue efforts."
The US had NO responsiblity to initiate rescue efforts. The fact that we may have had resources to know the Kursk was in trouble does not obligate us to reveal those resources and volunteer our services. Therefore, saying we "aided and abetted" is directing blame in the wrong direction.

Having said that, I'd like to carve his answer to the question "What were your key challenges?" into stone and bolt it to the front door of "news" organizations like WND. What was his key challange? "The constant flood of mounting conspiracy theories." After actually digging into the barest facts of the case, this author found out that incredibly, accidents do happen without cloak and dagger coverups and mysterious military "exercises". To everyone who says, "well ______ (fill in the blank) just don't explode", or "since that has never happened in the past, there is no way it could have happened now", I'd suggest they take a look at the Kursk.

It's strong, you're right. Writer probably emphasizes with the subject, or part of it - the sailors.

Interesting stuff about the Clinton administration I've never heard of before.

The conspiracy theories are still going good in Russia and France.

About the torpedo composition and detonation, I think so. The other stuff not so.

I see elsewhere a description that the book extensively addresses the political and cultural ramifications in Russia and Europe of the Kursk event. I'll check it out this weekend.

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