Reading through “Blind man’s Bluff” by Annette Lawrence Drew, Christopher Drew, and Sherry Sontag, which consists of a top secret, too-hot for newspapers recounting of American cold war bravado beneath the waves, one story in particular left a lasting impression. I found the the USS Lapon’s 47 day stalking of a USSR Yankee class submarine deeply impressive, and no tale of American exceptionalism is truly complete without a country cult classic.
The USS Lapon was set to be entirely scrapped in 1992, but her sail was spared an untimely demise, and is currently on display in Springfield MS. Cheating death both in her twilight years, and during a historic deployment to the North Atlantic in 1969, the Lapon trailed a then entirely new class of Soviet submarine for a record breaking 5 weeks. The ultraquiet Yankee class subs posed a daunting threat to the eastern seaboard, carrying long-range ballistics with thermonuclear ordinance. Unbenounced to the SOSUS early detection warning apparatus, telltale acoustic data for the Yankee subs was desperately needed to enhance preparedness. The USS Lapon first encountered the Yankee sub in the GIUK gap on September 17th 1969, preliminarily trailing the soviet behemoth for 18 hours. Serendipitously the Lapon found the Yankee anew on September 26th near the Azores. How Whitey Mack’s intuition led him to fall within 3000 yards of the Yankee in the vast Atlantic remains unanswered, but the sonar telemetry generated in the earlier encounter, bolstered by vastly superior American acoustics certainly contributed to relocating the Yankee.
Until October 9th, the Lapon stealthily trailed the Soviet sub, enumerating Russian shift changes, baffle cleaning maneuvers and ineffective routine enemy evasive maneuvers. In fact the crew of the Lapon became so familiarized with the Russian sub they could individuate one of the three Soviet officers standing watch by their minute navigational preferences. Importantly, the Lapon was able to deduce that Soviet ballistics had an effective range almost triple what was previously identified. The Yankee never ventured closer than within 1500km of the North American continent despite conventional Naval intelligence estimating an effective loitering range of approximately 500km.
Ultimately, a leak in the new york times on Oct 9th 1969 clued in the Russians of their longstanding American tail, and a series of spiteful and egregiously daring “crazy Ivan” maneuvers proved sufficient for the subs to part ways. Whitey Mack returned home a decorated, prideful hero, and the soviet captain with his tail tucked between his legs.
Reading through these stories of American submarine espionage success stories (and some tragedies) highlights some of the bygone competencies of the American success story of the mid 20th century. The USS Lapon, which set sail in 1966 was vastly technologically superior to the Yankee, which for instance was equipped with sonar with half the detective range of the American boat. The absolute technological dominance of the United States, particularly beneath the waves, needs to be critically dissected. How could a whisper quiet American sub trail a state of the art Soviet boat at such short distances over such an extended period without discovery? How could the American crew maintain operational composure and acoustic diligence for 40 odd days to avoid detection? How could Whitey Mack know where to park his sub near to Azores to intercept the the Yankee as it traversed southwards?