Review: Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an overview of secret sub actions during the Cold War interleaved with military fiction in creating fictive, imagined conversations and motivations. I can do without the fiction. For one thing, the author has the worst metaphors, such as a face like a "dirty dishrag" or something and other things that would be better left out. But, assuming I am correctly drawing out the nonfiction history, a few things are fascinating, if true:

* multiple Cuba missile crisis subs came near to launching nuke "purple-tipped" torpedoes

* The U.S. Navy radio specialist John Anthony Walker Jr. spy ring gave the USSR the key codes to combine with equipment taken from the USS Pueblo. This allowed them to know conclusively something that made them vengeful, possibly around realities of a collision of USS Swordfish with K-129. (Here, that Soviet sub deemed intentional and not rogue.)

* In 1981, USS Drum collided with the Victor III-class submarine K-324 while attempting to photograph the odd pod on the back. The event was covered up by the Reagan Administration and never made public, though it nearly cost the lives of the sailors on USS Drum. The collision occurred in Peter the Great Bay, not far from Vladivostok. The incident was declassified and disclosed by the Clinton Administration in February 1993. This is one of multiple incidents described around tapping of Soviet navy undersea cables.

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