Soviets Sank The U.S.S. Scorpion Submarine

Local Author Exposes Cold War Cover-Up

By David Angier
May 7, 2007
NewsHerald

Twenty-five years ago, Ed Offley stumbled into a story that ultimately could rewrite the way history views the Cold War.

The USS Scorpion nuclear submarine sank in the Mediterranean Sea in May 1968 with the loss of all 99 men on board.

For decades, the sinking was considered to be one of the great unsolved naval mysteries of all time.

On May 27, 1968, the Scorpion failed to arrive in port at Norfolk, Va., at its scheduled time. The Pentagon immediately launched a massive search operation, which concluded a week later with the presumption that the submarine was lost with all hands.

“When I tripped over the topic 15 years later that’s what I thought,” Offley, a Panama City Beach resident and News Herald reporter, said Thursday. “At that time, it was an all but forgotten story about 99 sailors that had died mysteriously.”

The Scorpion’s wreckage was found months later in the Mediterranean Sea. A board of inquiry reviewed available information and concluded that it didn’t know what caused the sinking.

In 1983, Offley was preparing an anniversary retrospective of the Scorpion for the Norfolk Ledger Star when he lined up an interview with retired Vice Adm. Arnold Schade, who gave him his first clue that this was a much bigger story.

“I set up this telephone interview and I went into it with not a suspicion,” Offley said. “Because I believed it was an accident, I wasn’t trying to trip him up into telling me a lie. It was very nonconfrontational. He warmed up to me and walked me through this horrible week that happened in May 1968.”

But during the interview, Schade let on that the search for the Scorpion was under way five days before the official search began. Five days before the government set in motion a very public search, a very private one had been on for some time.

Before Offley wrote his retrospective, he got confirmation of Schade’s account and broke that in his story.

A year later, after gaining access to declassified documents, Offley broke another story saying the Scorpion was sunk by its own malfunctioning torpedo.

“We published this major story and I was feeling pretty good about myself,” he said.

“The next day, the newspaper’s production supervisor came up to me with this malicious grin on his face. He told me it was a great story, but too bad I got the wrong cause for the sinking.”

The production manager was in his second career at that point, after spending 20 years in the Navy. In 1968 he was the admiral’s flag yeoman with access to all the top-secret documents at that time.

“He told me the Russians sank the Scorpion,” Offley said. The sinking was in retaliation, Offley said, for a mid-sea collision between U.S. and Soviet subs that resulted in the sinking of a Russian submarine.

Offley wasn’t able to confirm that for another 14 years.

He’d always thought he would put this information together for a book and was meticulous in keeping his records. Last year, a publisher agreed to the project and Offley spent nine months writing the book.

He didn’t have the final piece in place, however, until February, when he got confirmation of the most significant evidence of the sinking so far.

Since the 1950s, Offley learned, the government has had underwater tracking stations set up around the world. The technicians who monitor these recordings not only can distinguish submarine sounds, but pinpoint the exact submarine they’re listening to.

The Scorpion’s last minutes were recorded and Offley got access to two people who had analyzed the recordings.

They told him the recordings showed an underwater confrontation between the Scorpion and a Soviet sub that ended with the Russians firing a torpedo.

For five minutes, the Scorpion dodged the torpedo, but couldn’t escape.

Offley said the government can, and probably will, refute his findings.

“I don’t care. I don’t care,” he said. “I have dozens of sailors — people who were there for key moments in that story — and supportive proof that makes up a counter narrative that I am more confident in as the truth than the ‘we don’t know what happened’ that is the official government position.”