"After all, submarining has always been a game of blind man's bluff...."

Author's Rating:

Pros: Taut accounts of real-life sub espionage missions, well-written narrative.

Cons: None.

The Bottom Line: 
If you're a fan of Clancy's novels, or know anyone who served in subs during the Cold War and wondered what they did at sea, this book's for you.

Author's Review
...For more than four decades, under the cover of classifications even higher than top secret, the United States sent tens of thousands of men in cramped steel cylinders on spy missions off the rugged coasts of the Soviet Union. There, the job was to stay hidden, to gather information about the enemy's intentions and its abilities to make war at sea. By their very nature, submarines were perfect for this task, designed to lurk nearly silent and unseen beneath the waves. They quickly became one of America's most crucial spy vehicles.

No other intelligence operation has embraced so many generations of a single military force, no other has consistently placed so many Americans at risk. As many as 140 men in each sub, several subs at a time, nearly every man who has ever served on a U.S. attack submarine was sent to watch Soviet harbors and shipyards, monitor Soviet missile tests, or shadow Soviet subs. Several boats, such as Seawolf, were specially equipped to tap cables or retrieve pieces of Soviet weapons that had been fired in tests and had fallen to the bottom of the sea. No one was involved who didn't volunteer.

These submarine spies stood as lonely sentinels on the frontlines of a war that was waged fiercely by both sides. Only in this war the most important weapons weren't torpedoes, but cameras, advanced sonar, and an array of complicated eavesdropping equipment. And while these men rode some of the most technologically daunting craft ever built, their goals were deceptively simple: "Know thy enemy," learn enough to forestall a surprise attack, to prevent at any cost a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age.

-- Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew, Blind Man's Bluff

Early on in John McTiernan's 1990 film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October, there's a short but revealing scene depicting the USS Dallas, a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack sub (SSN) as it cruises off the Soviet naval base of Polyarny. In this sequence, we see Hollywood's semi-realistic take on the hazardous missions undertaken by the men of the "Silent Service"; a crack sonar operator (played by Law & Order CI cast member Courtney B. Vance) detects a new Soviet missile submarine as it comes out of the "barn" where the boomers are kept. And while some of the details were wrong, as Tom Clancy has stated in various interviews, this taut sequence catches the spirit and the tension of America's submarine sentinels who really did serve in those "cramped steel cylinders on spy missions off the rugged coasts of the Soviet Union."

With the twin specters of the memory of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the prospect of a war with the Soviet Union, the United States Navy and allied fleets deployed hundreds of submarines --starting with 1940s diesel-powered boats in the early days of the Cold War, then upgrading to nuclear subs in the 1950s -- on more than 2,000 missions to keep watch on the various naval bases and forces of the USSR. After all, it had been the lack of accurate intelligence about the Japanese carrier force that had been partially responsible for the American failure to detect and defend against the air strikes on Oahu on the Day of Infamy; now, with Josef Stalin's aggressive expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and the Soviet possession of the Bomb far earlier than anticipated (thanks to the Rosenbergs and other Soviet spies), intelligence gathering on Soviet naval capabilities and intentions became a top priority. And the obvious tool for this job was the Navy's submarine force.

Based on interviews, painstaking research, and the release of some previously classified materials, authors Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew have written a gripping and very revealing look at a secrecy-shrouded part of Cold War history most readers had only glimpsed through the eyes of such novelists as Edward L. Beach (Cold is the Sea) and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising); the narrative is just as full of suspense, drama (imagine, for instance, being in a GUPPY-class diesel submarine in Soviet waters, with Red Fleet surface warships pinging away with sonar and dropping depth charges) as any Clancy techno-thriller, with the difference being that Blind Man's Bluff is no work of imaginative fiction.

As the authors declare in their prologue, the book's 12 chapters are "about submarines, espionage, and geopolitics, but it is also a book about people: the poetry-spouting deep-sea scientist who was asked to conjure up ways of recovering nuclear missiles from the ocean floor; the Naval Intelligence officer whose childhood memories led him to conjure up the idea of tapping Soviet underwater communications cables; a cowboy sub commander who couldn't resist sneaking up within feet of Soviet subs; the men whose sub was held underwater with barely enough air to keep them alive as Soviet ships above rained down explosives." There is also the authors' research into the loss of USS Scorpion, a spy sub that sank with its entire crew in 1968 for reasons the Navy has never publicly speculated on.

Considering the complexity of the topic and the ingrained reluctance of the Silent Service to talk openly about subs and their clandestine operations, the authors do a good job in creating a compelling and informative account of the Navy's covert Cold War missions. Blind Man's Bluff is well-written and very accessible; I like the fine balance Sontag and the Drews managed to attain between the technical details of the boats and their equipment and the very human drama of the skippers -- mostly men in their mid-30s -- and sailors who served aboard the subs. It's a book that reads like The Hunt for Red October, only more gripping because it is all very real.