Soviet Foxtrot-class Submarine, Medway

The Cold War between NATO countries and the Soviet Union was fought by means of cat-and-mouse games, as potentially deadly as they were deeply hidden. One of these Cold War arenas was the ocean depths, from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea, where submarines armed to the teeth with lethal weaponry and surveillance technology tried to out-think and out-manoeuvre each other.

The workhorse of the Soviet submarine fleet was the Foxtrot-class submarine. This 300-foot-long cylinder of malevolent intent played a central role in perhaps the key moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came within a whisker of nuclear Armageddon. Foxtrot-class subs also patrolled British waters, coming closer to our shores than the public could ever have imagined. Ironically, one of these vessels has made its permanent home here, on the River Medway in Kent.

On a suitably murky day I went aboard and, with the help of a vice admiral of the Royal Navy and two former Soviet naval officers, relived some of the most perilous moments in our nation’s history. (On a separate visit to an airfield in the Midlands, I also talked to a former crew member of an RAF nuclear bomber who was on standby to attack the Soviet Union. I have threaded his account into the narrative to complete a most chilling picture.)

The submarine is moored on a loop of the Medway at Strood, with the Norman-era Rochester Castle looming on the east bank of the river beyond the road-and-railway bridge. The castle was built to protect against foreign invasion in an age of rudimentary wooden ships propelled by wind and oars, crewed by men armed with swords. The Foxtrot-class sub had ten torpedo tubes, could dive to a depth of nearly 1,000 feet and was capable of remaining submerged for up to ten days at a time.

The one I was about to explore had seen better days. As I approached on a river launch and it materialized through the mist, the phrase that came to mind was ‘rusting hulk’. Scaffolding covered the conning tower and its vast, bulbous-nosed bulk had the air of a mortally wounded beast. But what a beast it had evidently been. Even in a state of dilapidation this old bruiser of the Cold War exuded menace and defiance.

‘Foxtrot’ was a NATO designation. For the Soviets it was one of the ‘B’ class of subs – B standing for bolshaya, which means ‘large’ in Russian. It was built in Leningrad, went into service in 1967 as part of the Soviet Baltic fleet based in Riga, and was later used as a training vessel. After being decommissioned in 1994 it was sold into private hands and had been in two previous locations in England before being moved to the Medway in 2004. The owner is now trying to raise funds for its restoration.

I had time for a quick inspection before meeting my first witness and soon discovered that a submarine would not be my natural choice of work environment. A Cold War sub was a steel cigar where space was at a premium, the lighting was kept dimmed, the temperature was often unpleasantly high and the atmosphere rank with the stench of diesel, cigarettes and sweat. Then there was the added fear of being attacked, of the cigar becoming a coffin and the seabed a grave.

I shuddered at the thought of all this as I descended steps into the bowels of the beast and inched my way by torchlight past a blizzard of dials, switches and hatches. Seventy-eight men crewed on this sub, knocking shoulders and heads as they tried to move around in the confined space. Only one, the captain, had his own cabin. The rest ‘hot-bunked’ – shared their beds with one or more crew, swapping when shifts changed over. Those who bunked fore or aft had the torpedo tubes for company – six in the bow and four in the stern. The end of each tube is painted with a red communist star.

Back on the narrow steel deck I met my first witness, Vice Admiral Sir Toby Frere. Now eighty years old, Sir Toby is a distinguished submariner whose principal foes, back in the early 1960s, had been Soviet submarines and warships. As a young officer he served on HMS Astute, an ‘A’ class Royal Navy submarine with a mission to hunt down Russian subs such as the Foxtrot class, which were hiding in our waters for the purpose of gathering intelligence on British naval strength.

‘There’s a lot of ocean but this is a very noisy boat,’ Sir Toby told me. ‘The Russians had not latched on to just how noisy their submarines were.’ This gave the Royal Navy subs an advantage but sonar technology (the use of sound underwater to detect objects) was, he pointed out, in its infancy. ‘You’d just get a bearing on him, but you didn’t know how far away he might be,’ he said.

There was a grudging respect between enemies. Sir Toby admitted that the Soviets’ Foxtrot-class submarines were ‘the equal of our “A” class submarines and we saw it as such’. The invisible, near-silent games of stealth they played along the ocean bed must have seemed less than real at times. But in October 1962 Sir Toby and his fellow submariners, along with the crews of Foxtrot-class vessels, were pitched into the heart of a crisis that was nightmarishly real.

The first the world knew of the gravity of the situation was when the American president, John F. Kennedy, addressed the nation – and the world – on live television on the evening of 22 October 1962: ‘Within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island [of Cuba] … To halt this offensive build-up a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated …’ The Cuban Missile Crisis was approaching its most dangerous moments.

As America launched planes and ships to intercept Soviet shipments bound for Cuba, Sir Toby realized that Britain could not avoid being dragged into the conflict. ‘When President Kennedy made his speech on television we thought, “This is going to be us,”’ he said. Meanwhile, Soviet ships loaded with missiles and other military hardware were sailing for Cuba, escorted by Foxtrot-class submarines.

The full story of what happened in those next, crucial few days is still unknown. But one chilling fact has come to light. Unknown to the Americans and to NATO forces at the time, the Soviet subs were armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. And the crews were authorized to fire them should they come under attack. To help me piece together the sequence of events, I tracked down two Soviet naval men who had found themselves bang in the middle of one of the most dangerous moments in human history.

The television production company I worked with on the TV series of Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain pulled off a bit of a stunt by connecting me via Skype to these two Cold War veterans while I was actually in the submarine on the Medway. Anatoly Andreyev, who skippered Foxtrot-class subs, was touched to see his old place of work in the background as we communicated on screen via an interpreter. ‘I recognize everything!’ he said.

Anatoly was in charge of one of the submarines guarding the secret Soviet convoy carrying military equipment to Cuba. ‘We were moved and loaded with a nuclear-tipped torpedo,’ he told me. Retired Commander Felix Bryl was serving on one of the ships. ‘We were transferring rocket launchers,’ he said. Toby Frere was on the other side of the fence, on a secret intelligence mission authorized by the British government.

The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was a veteran of two world wars and acutely aware of Britain’s vulnerable position at this time. Wary of offending the Soviet Union, he was reluctant to commit British forces to the naval blockade of Cuba without a UN resolution. But in order to keep Britain’s ally, America, onside he committed British ships to a surveillance operation in the North Atlantic. Sir Toby, then a young naval officer serving on HMS Astute based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was part of that assignment.

‘We’d just come in from patrol, then on the Monday [22 October] President Kennedy made his speech on television,’ he said. ‘We were sent to sea and set up a barrier patrol off Newfoundland. We had American aircraft co-operating with us. We were there to see if Russian submarines were coming down from their northern fleet past Iceland, past Newfoundland, down to Cuba.’

Meanwhile, Britain was readying itself for possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. In a phone call to President Kennedy on 26 October, Macmillan suggested immobilizing America’s nuclear Thor missiles, which were then sited on British soil, as a means of easing tensions and removing Britain from the firing line. Kennedy rejected the idea. The prime minister remained wedded to a diplomatic solution but had to prepare for the worst. Britain’s own nuclear deterrent, the Blue Danube bomb, was carried on long-range Avro Vulcan bombers and was intended to be dropped on targets in the Soviet Union. The RAF’s Vulcan fleet was now put on high alert.

Through the second half of October 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis proceeded through a series of overlapping, interconnected events. To fully understand the British perspective, which had a chilling logic of its own, I had to make a separate trip across England, to Wellesbourne Airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire. Wellesbourne is a retirement home for one of the few remaining Avro Vulcan bombers, XM655, and therefore a good place to meet my final witness, Wing Commander Peter West. Now retired, he was aircrew on a nuclear-armed Vulcan squadron based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire that came within minutes of being deployed during those tense October days.

In the following account of what happened I have knitted together the testimonies of Wing Commander West and the two Russian naval officers. Up at Wellesbourne we sat on the flight deck of the delta-winged Vulcan (still futuristic-looking, though no Vulcans are airworthy these days) as Peter set the scene. ‘We reckoned – and it was all guesswork – that our chances of getting to the target were twenty per cent,’ he said. ‘If we had gone there was really very little chance of us getting back.’

His logbook from the time shows just how close they were to being deployed on what effectively would have been a suicide mission. He read out the relevant entry, written in red ink on yellowing paper: ‘The twenty-sixth to the twenty-eighth of October 1962. Cuban Missile Crisis. Squadron at Readiness State one five.’ This meant they were on fifteen minutes’ notice to take off. ‘We were that close,’ said Peter.

Meanwhile, the flotilla of Russian ships carrying missiles and armaments, escorted by Foxtrot-class submarines armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, was approaching Cuba. The Soviets’ unstoppable force was about to hit the immovable object of the American blockade. As the ships reached the arc-shaped cordon of American forces some 500 miles north of Cuba, the transport ship that Felix Bryl was on was buzzed by US fighter planes. ‘Aircraft were flying over us on a battle course,’ he said. ‘At that moment I understood that it was deadly dangerous.’

On 27 October, submerged in his Foxtrot-class sub, Anatoly Andreyev heard explosions. ‘It was impossible to tell if they were depth charges or bombs,’ he told me. ‘The situation was very difficult.’ What Anatoly had heard were ‘signalling’ or ‘practice’ depth charges, small explosive devices dropped on submarines to persuade them to surface and identify themselves. In this case they had been aimed at the sub next to his in the flotilla, B-59. On board this submarine was the commander of the entire flotilla, Vasili Arkhipov.

Down in these steel cigars, conditions were deteriorating to a level that could barely sustain human life. The vessels had been submerged for a week with only enough air to last for a further three days without surfacing. The temperature was ‘one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit’ according to Anatoly. Tempers were frayed and nerves shredded. So deep were the submarines that they were unable to monitor radio communications and the officers had no way of knowing what the situation was on the surface, whether war had already broken out.

They were, however, aware of their battle orders. In the event of attack, the captain was authorized to launch a nuclear torpedo provided he gained the permission of the ‘political officer’ (a representative of the Kremlin) on board. ‘All the torpedoes were ready for firing,’ confirmed Anatoly. On embattled submarine B-59 the officers began to argue about how to respond to the American aggression.

The situation regarding authorization was complicated on this particular sub due to the presence of the flotilla commander, Vasili Arkhipov. The captain, Valentin Savitsky, was in favour of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo but needed the sanction not just of the political officer but of Arkhipov as well. As the clock ticked in that fetid tube suspended in the ocean depths, the three of them were debating not just their immediate response but the future of the world.

At RAF Coningsby, Peter received a knock on the door of his married quarters. It was an RAF policeman: ‘“Sir, you’re wanted at the operations block immediately.” So I quickly hugged my wife and said to her, “If this is what I think it is, throw a few things in a bag, get the kids into the car and drive off to your brother in Skye. I think you’ll be safe there.”’ His voice cracked with emotion as he recalled this bittersweet moment.

In the end Arkhipov’s voice of reason prevailed. He refused to sanction a nuclear-tipped torpedo strike and Captain Savitsky pulled back from the brink. Submarine B-59 surfaced and revealed itself. Behind the scenes President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev worked to solve the crisis by diplomatic means: the Soviets would remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba if the Americans decommissioned some of theirs in Europe. Peter West did not have to fly to almost certain death over the Soviet Union. And Britain had avoided an unimaginable fate as a Soviet target in a nuclear war. For if, by some miracle, Peter had returned from his mission, what would he have returned to? ‘We knew that if it did happen there’d be very little left of the UK,’ he told me.

On the River Medway I took one last look round the old Soviet sub. This particular one was not deployed to the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But identical vessels were and on board one of them, B-59, in conditions of unbearable hardship and stress, arguments were put and decisions made that altered the course of human history.

Thirty years later the Cold War appeared to have a winner. So confident was the Western world of its military and moral superiority that when the Soviet Union collapsed, one distinguished American commentator even went so far as to pronounce the ‘end’ of history. In his book The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992, Francis Fukuyama argued that with the demise of Soviet communism the world order had been settled once and for all. Liberal democracy was the form of government to which all nations now aspired.

But history has a way of confounding us. Since then democracy has been in decline. Some emerging nations reject it as unsuitable for them and Britain’s relations with Russia have entered another winter. Today the future of the world is as murky as the light on the River Medway as I disembarked the Foxtrot-class sub. The outlines of new conflicts are being drawn – much of them still deeply hidden.