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Titanic Revelation

 

After investigating Thresher and Scorpion, Ballard had only 12 days to search for Titanic, and amazing enough, he found her. Ballard says he used the same techniques of tracing debris trails in his investigation of the submarines to find Titanic.

 

The revelation of the real impetus behind Ballard’s mission opens up more questions, about the fate of USS Scorpion, which mysteriously sank off the Azores on June 5, 1968 after monitoring Soviet naval activity. Ballard said of Scorpion, “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine.  There was a long debris trail,” and surmised that it had been hit by a rogue torpedo, which it had fired.

 

Controversy has surrounded Scorpion from day one. Many theories abound as to why the submarine sank. One theory posits that a critical design flaw in its Mk 37 torpedoes caused one to explode sending the sub to the bottom of the Atlantic.  Another theory blames the accident on the lack of needed repairs and maintenance. The more controversial theories have all the trappings of a Cold War spy novel. These theories claim that the Soviets sunk Scorpion in retaliation for the loss of their own sub K-129, off Hawaii. 

 

Ed Offley, in his book Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion, claims that the Soviets torpedoed Scorpion with the help of cryptographic information provided by American spy John Anthony Walker. Walker a communications specialist gave Soviet intelligence the ability to eavesdrop on the Navy’s Atlantic Submarine Command communications traffic. The Soviets could literally receive, in real time, the same communications sent to all sub commanders in the Atlantic. Offely argues that the Soviets, using the information provided by Walker, trailed Scorpion and sunk her in retaliation for what they believed to be the US Navy’s culpability in the sinking of the K-129. In 1968, Richard Nixon authorized Project Jennifer the salvage the K-129. He ordered the CIA to run the operation, not the Navy in order to keep it secret. One outlandish theory goes so far as to claim that the rogue KGB agents commandeered K-129 in order to strike Pearl Harbor with nuclear missiles.

 

It is quite possible we will never know Scorpion’s true fate; even the Navy does not have a definitive conclusion, and there are flaws with all the various theories.