Inside, they would take the stairway up to the second-floor message center.
#Submarine missing code
Walking up to the unassuming brick building, they would show their ID cards to the armed marine guards, then step up to the door at the ground-floor entrance to punch in the code to release the cipher lock. As usual, he thought about the abrupt change in atmosphere he and his coworkers encountered each time they went on duty. “Nothing came in or went out that didn’t go through that desk.”ĭuring the five-minute walk from his barracks to the COMSUBLANT message center that Thursday, May 23, Hannon was unsure what he would find. “All messages, incoming or outgoing, were routed through my desk,” Hannon recalled years later. The radiomen reversed the process for incoming messages, taking encrypted transmissions from the submarines and “breaking” them back into clear text by using the same encryption gear.
#Submarine missing full
They worked in a large room full of top-secret encryption machines that took clear-text messages, scrambled them into impenetrable gibberish, and then dispatched the blocks of seemingly random text in Morse code via high-frequency radio to submarines at sea. Was this the first hint of an emergency, Hannon wondered, or merely a delayed transmission caused by mechanical problems or stormy weather conditions? Inside the norfolk nerve centerĪssigned to the message center at Submarine Force Atlantic (COMSUBLANT) headquarters in Norfolk, Hannon and a handful of other young sailors were responsible for processing all incoming and outgoing messages for submarines then operating with the Atlantic Fleet. He then tapped on his supervisor’s office door and asked whether any late word had come in from the Scorpion. As he prepared to leave for the night, Hannon had briefed Radioman 2nd Class Ken Larbes, the petty officer coming on duty, about the overdue message. Submarine Scorpion.” But the previous day, no message had come clattering out of the secure teletypewriter that Hannon used. Its standing orders called for a burst transmission every 24 hours that, when decrypted, read: “Check 24. The Norfolk-based USS Scorpion, one of the Atlantic Fleet’s 19 nuclear attack submarines, had been scheduled to transmit a four-word “Check Report”-encrypted to prevent the Soviets from intercepting it-that meant, in essence, “Situation normal, proceeding as planned.” In this instance, the Skipjack-class submarine was returning to Norfolk after a three-month deployment to the Mediterranean Sea. But hours earlier, when his eight-hour shift had ended at midnight, Hannon feared that one of the submarines on his watch might be in trouble-or worse. As a communications specialist at Submarine Force Atlantic Headquarters, he was responsible for processing dozens of messages each day from submarines at sea, ranging from routine announcements to top-secret operational dispatches.
RADIOMEN 2ND CLASS MIKE HANNON WALKED TO WORK WITH A PALPABLE SENSE OF UNEASE on the morning of May 23, 1968. What Really Happened to the Nuclear Sub USS Scorpion? Close
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