On Listening, Listeners and Liars.
On Listening, Listeners and Liars. By Steve Douglass The K-219 accident happened in October 1986 , and the submarine sank on October 6, 1986 , in the North Atlantic northeast of Bermuda. Few knew about it until I opened my big mouth. By the time the world heard about K-219 , I knew more than most people in the Pentagon . One October night, when shortwave propagation was near perfect (no fading) I was dialing through the bands when I came upon some U.S. Navy HF traffic on 8.989 MHz, upper sideband. That night it was mostly routine communications checks until I intercepted a phone patch to the U.S. Navy Department—the kind of transmission you pay attention to because of its tone as much as its content. A U.S. ship was on scene, and the voice on the circuit was tight, controlled, but unmistakably alarmed. They were reporting Soviet sailors up on the deck of the submarine, and more to the point, that radiation detectors were sounding off. I ha...
