Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion

Blind Man's "Bluff meets The Hunt for Red October" in the shocking untold story of an American submarine torpedoed at the height of the Cold War - and the forty year cover-up that followed.One Navy admiral called it "one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era." To this day, the U.S. Navy officially calls it an inexplicable accident. But a small handful of Navy leaders, submariners and intelligence officials from that era have long known otherwise: that the loss of the USS Scorpion (SSN 589) and its crew of 99 men on May 22, 1968, was an act of war. The Scorpion was sunk by a Soviet sub in an act of reprisal for the sinking of the Soviet missile sub K-129, which had gone down in the Pacific just ten weeks before.The Scorpion sinking is not a mystery; it is a Cold War secret that has been buried by both the U.S. and Soviet governments since 1968. At the time, both sides quickly realized that the back-to-back submarine sinkings - if publicly known - could have turned the Cold War into a hot war overnight.For nearly 40 years, the Navy and U.S. intelligence communities have continued to cover up the facts of the Scorpion sinking, citing the need to protect top secret military classification. The full account of its loss has continued to elude and frustrate researchers, journalists and family members of the lost crew - until now.After a quarter century of research, this book is the first to tell the story of what actually happened to the ninety-nine members of the U.S. Navy's elite Submarine Service who disappeared in the service of their country to a watery grave on the ocean floor 11,100 feet down. It reveals that the Navy's official Scorpion story - from the sub's failure to make port to a frantic open-ocean hunt, to a scientific search that ultimately "found" the wreckage, to a Court of Inquiry's carefully-crafted conclusions - was all a lie.