Posted on 05/07/2007 5:09:13 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Twenty-five years ago, Ed Offley stumbled into a story that ultimately could rewrite the way history views the Cold War.
The USS Scorpion nuclear submarine sank in the Mediterranean Sea in May 1968 with the loss of all 99 men on board. For decades, the sinking was considered to be one of the great unsolved naval mysteries of all time.
On May 27, 1968, the Scorpion failed to arrive in port at Norfolk, Va., at its scheduled time. The Pentagon immediately launched a massive search operation, which concluded a week later with the presumption that the submarine was lost with all hands.
“When I tripped over the topic 15 years later that’s what I thought,” Offley, a Panama City Beach resident and News Herald reporter, said Thursday. “At that time, it was an all but forgotten story about 99 sailors that had died mysteriously.”
The Scorpion’s wreckage was found months later in the Mediterranean Sea. A board of inquiry reviewed available information and concluded that it didn’t know what caused the sinking.
In 1983, Offley was preparing an anniversary retrospective of the Scorpion for the Norfolk Ledger Star when he lined up an interview with retired Vice Adm. Arnold Schade, who gave him his first clue that this was a much bigger story.
“I set up this telephone interview and I went into it with not a suspicion,” Offley said. “Because I believed it was an accident, I wasn’t trying to trip him up into telling me a lie. It was very nonconfrontational. He warmed up to me and walked me through this horrible week that happened in May 1968.”
But during the interview, Schade let on that the search for the Scorpion was under way five days before the official search began. Five days before the government set in motion a very public search, a very private one had been on for some time.
Before Offley wrote his retrospective, he got confirmation of Schade’s account and broke that in his story.
A year later, after gaining access to declassified documents, Offley broke another story saying the Scorpion was sunk by its own malfunctioning torpedo.
“We published this major story and I was feeling pretty good about myself,” he said. “The next day, the newspaper’s production supervisor came up to me with this malicious grin on his face. He told me it was a great story, but too bad I got the wrong cause for the sinking.”
The production manager was in his second career at that point, after spending 20 years in the Navy. In 1968 he was the admiral’s flag yeoman with access to all the top-secret documents at that time.
“He told me the Russians sank the Scorpion,” Offley said. The sinking was in retaliation, Offley said, for a mid-sea collision between U.S. and Soviet subs that resulted in the sinking of a Russian submarine.
Offley wasn’t able to confirm that for another 14 years. He’d always thought he would put this information together for a book and was meticulous in keeping his records. Last year, a publisher agreed to the project and Offley spent nine months writing the book.
He didn’t have the final piece in place, however, until February, when he got confirmation of the most significant evidence of the sinking so far. Since the 1950s, Offley learned, the government has had underwater tracking stations set up around the world. The technicians who monitor these recordings not only can distinguish submarine sounds, but pinpoint the exact submarine they’re listening to.
The Scorpion’s last minutes were recorded and Offley got access to two people who had analyzed the recordings. They told him the recordings showed an underwater confrontation between the Scorpion and a Soviet sub that ended with the Russians firing a torpedo. For five minutes, the Scorpion dodged the torpedo, but couldn’t escape.
Offley said the government can, and probably will, refute his findings.
“I don’t care. I don’t care,” he said. “I have dozens of sailors — people who were there for key moments in that story — and supportive proof that makes up a counter narrative that I am more confident in as the truth than the ‘we don’t know what happened’ that is the official government position.”
I was deeply involved in what was called special ops 400 for 8-9 years and a key player in developing the system AN/WLR-() that was initially installed on the 637 class boats. Off the coast of Russian in 1961 when they tested their first 50 megaton nuclear bomb, Cuban missile crisis and the attack on U.S.S. Liberty. I was the first CTM assigned to a boat as a regular member of the crew on U.S.S TRITON. The U.S.S. THRESHER went to sea on the same day the SEAWOLF did to check out all the special equipment I had installed on her. From what I was able to record on magnetic tape clearly indicated, she did not sink to the bottom as quickly as they announced to the public.
The Scorpion was lost off the coast of the Azores and initially everyone tried to search on her projected course. That is until one engineer who knew about the battery problem with the MK-48 torpedo realized they reversed course hoping to shut down the weapon. That was a standard procedure in dealing with a MK-48 gone wild. BuShips knew about the shorting problem with the battery just like a problem with the MK-14 during WWII and the slow process in coming up with a proper fix. It typically took such a disaster to get those civilian types off their dead asses and fix these kinds of problems.
I had a hell of a lot of trouble getting those same people to accept my concept and configuration for the AN/WLR-6 system until NSA and DNI went over their heads.
Now if you really want to know of a cover up by our government then look into actually what happened to the U.S.S. LIBERTY in June 1967? That was a cover up from the word go.
ended up in DC working in the same office with a MOTU chief that fixed our boat in La Spezia.
and now sharing an office with an ex officer that new the same folks as I back in my Squadron 6 days (mid 80s)
so YOU’RE the guy that supposedly went insane after developing the WLR-9????!!!
LOL
>This kind of stuff really happened.
There are a number of incidents here.
CASUALTIES OF THE COLD WAR
http://www.3ad.org/coldwar/coldwar_casualties.htm
Not the link I thought it was. Let me try to dig a little more.
Here we go, this is the one I meant to post:
Published Cold War Shoot Down Incidents
http://www.aiipowmia.com/koreacw/cw1.html
Well, in the first place, THAT is wrong. She is off the Azores in the well into the Atlantic - practically mid Atlantic..
I think maybe we need to bring Art Bell & Coast to Coast AM in on this one.
Beat me to it.
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