All Hands Down

[Don Boyer]

I have been waiting to get this book back from my son so I could put a few words down on this book "All Hands Down" by Kenneth Sewell and Jerome Preisler (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008). Simon and Schuster must be getting desperate for book profits.

Following in the footseps of Sewell's previous submarine book "Red Star Rogue," about the loss of the Russian K-129 it has about the same level of credibility -- none.

This effort purports to "prove" that the USS Scorpion, lost off the Azores, went down as a result of a deliberate Soviet attack in retribution for the loss of the K-129, which the Soviets "assumed" had been lost due to collision with the USS Swordfish in the Pacific. Supposedly, this retribution was directed by the Commander in Chief of the Soviet navy, Fleet Admiral Gorshkov.

The book contains not one substantiated proveable fact concerning the main premise of the book. In fact the book falls apart in the first 30 pages when Sewell describes Admiral Gorshkov as "....having a well earned reputation as a tough, scrupulous administrator". "...he required absolute competence from his subordinates." "The admiral refused to tolerate any attempt at speculative reasoning." And, finally, "A staff member who included unsubstanitated, innacurate or manipulated material in his reports was quickly transferred to a remote post, his career shattered."

Yet, according to Sewell, it was this same admiral that immediately assumed, with no substantiating facts in hand, that the K-129 had been somehow sunk by the Swordfish when the latter sub showed up in Yokosuka, Japan with a mangled sail some 17 days after K-129 was lost. Supposedly, the good admiral was enraged and ordered revenge, which is completely at odds with the earlier statements on the Admirals integrity. The logic of the book falls apart right here.

This is the type of historical drivel to be detested in the extreme. Everything is based on supposition, connecting only the dots one wants to connect, and without any actual facts upon which to rely, since everything that would "prove" anything is highly classified in both navys. The statements of anonymous sources can't be proved one way or another, yet the conclusions in the book rely almost exclusively on "off the record comments" and anonymous contributors, both Russiand and American.

The comments of retired Soviet officers claiming having deliberately sunk a US sub are completely unreliable. Of course they'd like to claim something like that kind of coup -- during the Soviet era they were lucky to detect a US sub, much less track one for any length of time with their surface ships, and they constantly has their noses rubbed in it trying to deal with the threat posed by the US navy's nuclear attack boats and boomers.

Yet Sewell blithely plows on with his plot of revenge and cover-up. Losing a nuclear sub to collision with a Soviet ship (or vice versa) is one thing; losing one to a deliberate torpedoeing is quite something else -- an open act of war, for one thing, and even if war didn't result due to political tip-toeing, there would have been consequences.

Facts, documentation, comments made "on the record" and photographic evidence do not grace the pages of this book. Even if the supposition were true, this book doesn't do a thing to prove it. I strongly recommend this book to my forum friends as a "must read" -- to show what good historical writing isn't!

[emason]

This sort of thing is one of my pet hates also. I just do not see the point of taking an historical fact and weaving a web of fiction around it, except for the enrichment of the author. There or too many works of "Faction" around, both in print and on television. The uninitiated or naive who can not distinguish the fiction part, usually end up having a completly wrong idea of history. It is no wonder that the level of ignorance of our history today is so high.

[Don Boyer]

I'm with you, Bill. All any forum member needs to do is read this book and compare it for example, to your excellently researched posts on Jutland.

For those interested in writing "history" a good read of Aurthur Marder's Introduction to his five-volume series on the RN in WWI, ("From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow," Vol 1: "The Road to War," p. viii) would be advisable to distinguish from writing what is historically relevant from writing that is intended to grind a particular axe on the part of the author and nothing more except, of course, garner profits from the dead.

[Lee Mathers]

The book "Project Azorian" by Norman Polmar & Michael White is now being shipped by Amazon and will soon be on the shelves of all the bookstores.

Here is a review posted on Amazon on the book -- contrasting it with all of Ken Sewell's books and their ilk:




Facts Stranger than Fiction


“Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129” by noted naval historian Norman Polmar, and documentary film producer Michael White has just been released and provides the general public with the first unclassified, factual accounting of a unique event in world history – the loss of a nuclear-missile-equipped submarine in 1968, and it subsequent clandestine (partial) salvage recovery in 1974 by the CIA.

In the intervening 35-plus years, there have been several books published solely on K-129 and the CIA’s recovery attempt, incorrectly reported by the press as “Project Jennifer”, as well as many magazine and newspaper articles. These reportings seem to have devolved over the years, as ignorance has been gradually replaced by unsupported theories, wild speculation, and finally by absolute nonsense. These fantasies (represented as factual accountings) eventually motivated several men who participated in Project Azorian to step forward for in-depth interviews revealing the complete history of Azorian in intimate detail.

Added to the information obtained in these interviews of CIA & Naval officers, men onboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer, and ex-Soviet officials, Polmar & White have published actual photography of the K-129 wreck and, perhaps most astonishingly, have published the recorded sound trace of the catastrophe which sunk that unfortunate ship, recorded by the U.S. Air Force world-wide hydrophone system called “AFTAC” – and revealing that the Navy’s SOSUS system never detected the deployment or sinking of K-129.

To these unprecedented sources, add an extensive interview with Soviet Admiral Viktor Dygalo, who was the K-129’s Division Commander in 1968, and a document review of Russian-language sources concerning Soviet naval activity in the Pacific in 1968. To this, add declassified documents revealing U.S. Pacific fleet surveillance and operational activities in the northern Pacific February through May 1968, KH-4 satellite photography of the Petropavlavsk submarine complex in March 1968, and interviews with U.S. naval personnel (who participated in events that conspiracy theorists can only speculate about - specifically the Officer-of-the-Deck of USS Swordfish when she bent her periscope; and individuals involved in the 1972/73 Trieste dives north of Kauai). Finally integrate the information revealed in a 50-page CIA history released in 2010 in reaction to Michael White’s documentary film – and you get the most complete and detailed rendering of this event available outside the confines of the U.S. intelligence community.

Determining the cause of the loss by accident of any vessel is made difficult or impossible if there are no survivors to question, and nothing to salvage for forensic reconstruction. Yet with a very detailed analysis of the acoustic information, Polmar & White come close to an explanation of the catastrophe. When the acoustics are combined with an examination of the photography, and Russian reports of K-129 communications problems at-sea are integrated – certain probabilities identify themselves.

Like many such catastrophes, the information in “Project Azorian” reveals that two or more highly improbable events occurred in succession, finding a pathway to disaster which designers never considered and provided no safety cut-out to prevent. But these explanations seem so unusual that further expertise (probably only available in Russia from ex-Soviet naval architects, equipment designers, naval officers, and training specialists) will be required to verify and explain all the new evidence and identify a definitive chain-of-events to failure as well as a “first cause”.

After an in-depth explanation of the CIA’s Project Azorian salvage attempt, and its planned successor Project Matador, Polmar & White review what the CIA salvaged from the wreck, and whether or not the “take” was worth the cost. An exquisitely detailed blow-by-blow discussion of the Project intelligence-and-political-review process is included, providing the reader with an understanding of how “black” ops are evaluated and approved within the Executive Branch of government.

The book ends with eight appendices detailing information on the K-129, its crew, its missiles, the USS Halibut (SSN-587), the lift ship – Hughes Glomar Explorer, the capture vehicle (the claw), and the Hughes Mining Barge (the submergible dry dock for the capture vehicle), 14 pages of “Notes”, a “Book List”, and a complete index. The “Book List” is a bibliography of preceding books concerning “K-129” with an evaluation of the factual or speculative nature of their contribution to the public’s knowledge of this unprecedented event.

If the above does not reveal my unbounded enthusiasm for this book, it is a failure as a review. While others have postured and claimed unique knowledge of the K-129 and the CIA’s salvage effort to recover it from the ocean bottom 3-miles beneath the surface, Polmar & White deliver exactly that – unique knowledge of a fascinating and heretofore highly-classified incident during the Cold War.

Project Azorian cost the American tax payers about $1.4 billion dollars (2010 dollars), spent between 1968 - 1975. Now for the first time, we can see what our representatives in the “Black” communities did with our money, and whether they properly protected our interests during those years of confrontation and threat.

[Don Boyer]

Lee, that book is at the top of the list I'm sending Santa this year.

Thanks for the detailed and informative review. Puts books like the one I reviewed on this thread in their appropriate place -- in the trash can. I do buy those books, knowing what I'm going to find, for their usefulness in showing "how it's not done" in the real world of history. Norman Polmar is absoulutely tops in his field, and the differences in writing and documentation are obvious.

Regards,