You Must Go Home Again

By George Russell

The released Soviet sub heads for port and hard questions

The antiquated gray submarine was towed part of the way down the channel it had navigated on its own ten days before. Finally it cast off. Then, joining the flotilla of naval vessels hovering anxiously beyond the twelve-nautical-mi. limit, Soviet "Whiskey"-class submarine No. 137 headed for its home base at Baltiysk, near the port of Kaliningrad. So ended, peacefully enough, the diplomatic uproar that began when Sweden discovered the sub on a reef in a restricted military zone only nine miles from Karlskrona, an ultrasensitive naval base on the Baltic Sea. The incursion of the sub, said Prime Minister Thorbjorn Falldin last week, was "the most flagrant violation of Swedish territory since World War II." Then Falldin added, "The violation was bad enough, but worse is the fact that the submarine most likely carried nuclear warheads [on its torpedoes], according to our investigations."

Initially, the Swedes had vowed to keep the intruder until the Soviets gave an adequate explanation of how and why its skipper had come to grief only ten yds. from shore, like a careless Sunday yachtsman caught by an ebbing tide. The Swedes scoffed at the Soviets' reported claim that the sub's navigation gear had failed: after all, it had certainly been working well enough to guide the vessel up the channel in the first place. Declared General Lennart Ljung, the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces: "I don't think it happened because the gyrocompass broke down. They have many other ways of navigating."

But the Soviets apologized and agreed to pay some $658,000 for the salvage operations and, after some sharp diplomatic words, the Swedes agreed to let the sub go. The episode embarrassed not only the Soviets; the Swedes did not explain how a submarine of 1950s vintage had managed to penetrate its waters undetected until a passing fisherman in a dory looked over and there she was, atop the rocks.

The events leading to the release of the sub were a mixture of high drama and low slapstick. For six days, Commander Pyotr Gushin refused to leave his stranded vessel to talk to the Swedes. Not until Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko allowed Gushin to cooperate did the commander relent. The skipper and his navigation officer emerged, asked for and were allowed permission to shower, and then settled down to claim during a seven-hour interrogation that they had hit the reef because their compass had failed.

Only an hour after Gushin had left the sub, the harsh Baltic elements took an unexpected hand in the plot. Gale winds of up to 85 m.p.h. slammed towering combers against the sides of the sub, cascading tons of water on deck. The 50-man Soviet crew quickly decided it could stand no more. Red flares signaling distress whooshed up from the conning tower, and the radio put out the call "Mayday, Mayday." Under the sea's battering, the submarine developed a 17DEG list to starboard. The vessel's large electrical storage batteries threatened to leak acid that could fill the hull with poisonous chlorine gas.

The Swedes hurried to the rescue.

Harbor Master Uffe Jansson, who went aboard the sub, later said he found the atmosphere "panic-loaded." Said Jansson: "About ten of the men were running in circles around each other." But Gunnar Rasmusson, a Swedish submarine commander for eight years, was sympathetic to the Soviets. Said he: "It's torture to hear how the boat in hard weather slams on the rocks lying right under it. The sound rings through the whole boat. You can't stand still, you can't eat, you can't drink. To be idle locked in a submarine can break anyone."

Finally, after two hours of maneuvering, four Swedish tugboats managed to shunt the sub into a nearby haven.

Even then, the Soviets remained skittish: 31 hours after the rescue, signal flares lit up the night sky. The Swedes dispatched another rescue team. It found no emergency, just anxious crewmen who wanted to know the whereabouts of Commander Gushin and his navigator. Asked one Soviet sailor: "Are they your prisoners?"

Hardly. After his first lengthy questioning, which left the Swedes "not satisfied," Gushin, on orders from his superiors, demanded that further interrogations take place aboard the sub. He continued to stick to his story of flawed navigational equipment. Swedish officials boarded the sub and found the navigational gear in order. They also discovered a surprise.

Huddled below decks was the head of the entire Soviet submarine flotilla at Baltiysk.

His presence fueled speculation that the submarine might have been eavesdropping on communications traffic at Karlskrona, or laying underwater navigational beacons in the tricky waters around the Blekinge archipelago, or updating Soviet knowledge of the area (especially since the Swedes habitually misdraw public charts of the sensitive waters, precisely to confuse the Soviets).

The din grew louder with the Swedish announcement that their investigators had become certain that uranium 238 was aboard the sub, leading to the accusation that it probably carried nuclear weapons. To the Swedish charge, the Soviets replied only that the vessel carried the "necessary weapons and ammunition."

The nuclear discovery undermined Moscow's intensive courtship of the Scandinavian countries, aimed at banning nuclear weapons from their territory as a matter of principle. It was the final embarrassment in ten days of humiliation.

Normally, a submarine crew, weary of tight quarters, cannot wait to get back to home port. But as Commander Gushin and his crew headed out to sea last week, the voyage of 200 miles to Baltiysk and the waiting Soviet interrogators must have seemed far, far too short.

--By George Russell. Reported by Mary Johnson/Stockholm

With reporting by Mary Johnson

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