Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. [Mass Market Paperback]

Kenneth Sewell (Author), Clint Richmond (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 26, 2006

March 7, 1968: Several hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, the nuclear-armed K-129 surfaces and then sinks; all of its crewmen and officers perish at sea. Who was commanding the rogue Russian sub? What was its target? How did it infiltrate American waters undetected? Navy veteran Kenneth Sewell, drawing from newly declassified documents and extensive confidential interviews, exposes the stunning truth behind an operation calculated to provoke war between the U.S. and China -- a nightmare scenario averted by only seconds. In full, authoritative detail, Red Star Rogue illuminates this history-shaping event -- and rings with chilling relevance in light of today's terrorist threat.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Reads like the latest Tom Clancy thriller....Fascinating...frightening."

-- The Flint Journal

"Frightening....As exciting as any novel."

-- The Associated Press

"A remarkable account [from] a veteran submariner."

-- Bookspan

About the Author

Kenneth R. Sewell is a nuclear engineer and a U.S. Navy veteran who spent five years aboard the USS Parche, a fast attack submarine that was the Navy's most decorated ship. Parche conducted a number of special operations, some of which were revealed in Blind Man's Bluff. Since leaving the Navy, Mr. Sewell has held both Department of Defense and Department of Energy security clearances. In researching Red Star Rogue, Mr. Sewell had access to recently declassified intelligence files in the U.S. and Soviet military archives that were opened after 1991, among other sources. A New York Times bestseller, Red Star Rogue has been optioned for film by Warner Brothers.

Clint Richmond is a veteran journalist and author based in Austin, Texas. His book Selena!, about the murder of the legendary Tejana singer, was a #1 bestseller.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Star (September 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416527338
• ISBN-13: 978-1416527336
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,266 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > History > Russia
  • #17 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > History > Military > Naval
  • #20 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Current Events > Conspiracy Theories

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Factually challenged, to say the least., February 11, 2007

By 

William F. Twist - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. (Mass Market Paperback)

First, I want to say that I really, really wanted to like this book. I really did. But there were so many factual problems with it, that I can't take it seriously.

First and foremost, the author mentions on several pages that the explosion aboard K-129 was monitored by a US early warning satellite. The problem with this is that according to "Guardians, Strategic Reconnaissance Satellites" by Curtis Peebles (Presidio Press, 1987. ISBN 0-89141-284-0), a comprehensive work on intelligence satellites from the beginning until 1985, there were no early warning satellites in operation in March 1968, when K-129 went down. The low orbit MIDAS follow-up program was cancelled in 1966 (due to problems with coverage and false alarms), and Project 949, its geosynchronous replacement, wasn't launched until August of 1968. So, it couldn't have been been monitored, because we didn't have the capability at the time K-129 sank.

Also, Sewell claims that the sailing was timed to prevent it from being detected by photoreconaissance satellites, but again we run into an issue: At the time, *ALL* US photorecon satellites were 'film return' types. In other words, they imaged what they saw directly on to film, and when they were done they returned that film back to Earth to be developed and interpreted. After they ejected the film, they were essentially useless. Referring back to "Guardians" again, we find that the Russians didn't have to try very hard to evade them: Launch 1968-5 was on January 18th, and had a lifetime of 17 days. That put the return back on February 5th. K-129 sailed on February 24th. The next US launch wasn't until March 13th, almost a week after K-129 sank.

Also, the author claims that K-129 was followed by a Permit class submarine, and that this sub recorded the acoustical signature for later processing on land-based Cray supercomputers. Remember, this is 1968. Seymour Cray didn't found Cray Research until 1972, and the first Cray-1 wasn't completed until 1976. Now, I have no doubt that the boat could have been followed, and its signature recorded for processing back on land, but if the author makes a mistake like this (and the aforementioned ones), how can you trust the other claims?

There are other problems as well.

I find it completely plausible that we wanted to raise the boat for examination of the missiles, especially the warheads, and to get the code materials. Now, it is true that the code machine and settings would have been old. Those not familiar with the story of how the British broke the German naval Enigma back in WWII would wonder how 5 year old code materials could be of help in breaking new codes. First, because K-129 was a strategic nuclear asset, it is likely that it had the best code machine the Russians could produce. That means that likely it was still in use at the time of the attempt to raise it. Even if it was not, it would allow us to decode the material from the time of the sinking (provided the codebooks containing the settings for the machine had been preserved - a pretty likely scenario). That would give us insight into the communications of the Soviet Navy with its ballistic missile submarines. Because military messages tend to be pretty strictly formatted, and those formats don't change greatly over the years, that would give those in the NSA working on the then current Soviet codes probable texts to use as 'cribs' to help them decode Soviet naval communications.

This book reminds me of a book I read a long time ago about the Face on Mars. All speculation, and very little actual factual information. I was sorely disappointed, because I was hoping that over the years new light would have been shed on the sinking and subsequent recovery of at least part of the K-129. Unfortunately, this book ain't it. Instead of shining a light, this book obscures the actual incident in supposition, speculation, and outright misrepresentations of the facts.

21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Cold War's version of "The Philadelphia Experiment", October 30, 2006

By 

Rottenberg's rotten book review (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. (Mass Market Paperback)

Unsupported, and often contradictory supposition aboubds in "Red Star Rogue", which tells the story of the Soviet K-129, a nuclear missile sub that sank in the Pacific in early 1968. Already famous for the attempt to salvage it using the "Glomar Explorer" (told in 1998's "Blind Man's Bluff", but already well-known), K-129's loss had long been thought due an accident. The authors boldly argue otherwise - that K-129's sank due to a botched attempt to launch missiles against Hawaii, a plan sanctioned at the top of the Soviet leadership to instigate a Chinese-American war. The authors also repudiate accounts that the Glomar Explorer was only partially successful in recovering K-129.

To call the author's case "circumstantial" doesn't begin to cover "Rogue"'s problems. Intriguing at first for its depiction of life aboard a crude diesel-electric sub, "Rogue" soon veers into "Philadelphia Experiment" territory when the authors prove willing to piece together any evidence regardless of how little it supports the author's case or excludes more reasonable alternatives. (Contrary to popular belief, "circumstantial evidence" isn't lower-grade evidence - it's still bound by old-fashioned rules of reasonability, which the authors bury at sea.) Most of the story relies on information which suggests what would or could have happened, but with too little if anything to establish what did happen. "Rogue" so baldly evades any reasonable explanation clashing with its claims (of a hijacking, attempted launch and complete salvage) that just finishing "Rogue" will stretch your suspension of disbelief. "Rogue" is loaded with footnotes - most of which cite to meetings with anonymous sources, or to either "Blind Man's Bluff" or a history of the Glomar Explorer" written by Burleson. Little of the quoted material corroborates either of the book's central theses of a rogue-attack or a successful salvage, or supports anything more than an appearance of research. In fact, the authors spend a lot of time actually repudiating those sources. (e.g. John Craven's claim that K-129 disintegrated like an Alka-Seltzer tablet after Glomar's retrieval robot collapsed is actually ridiculed, but the authors' conflicting example, using RMS Titanic is utterly ludicrous.)

The authors balance a host of possibilities on top of each other as supportive proof - there were extra men on K-129 placed at the last minute, but there's no record of them (a memorial later carries extra names, but the authors never follow up on them) - but if they had been there, they could have been KGB "Oznaz" commandos who could have commandeered the ship, and would have had training in using nukes; the Americans determine the truth, but kept quiet for "political" reasons.

The proof is selectively analyzed. The extra crewmen are "established" to have been aboard, even though there's no record of their being aboard, and any record, the authors say, could have been falsified by the high-ranking plotters. The authors never consider an innocuous explanation for their presence (US ships have "riders", especially following a refit such as the one detailed for K-129) or that evidence of their existence may be a simple clerical error (if the plotters were highly placed, couldn't they have simply substituted the desired crewmen?). The authors discount a voluntary role played by the actual executive staff because their high rank made them loyal - but then implicate higher ranking members of Soviet leadership; the KGB hijackers accidentally destroy the ship trying to bypass safeguards on the ship's warheads - even though (as the authors claim) such troops already had access to nuclear weapons thus obviating the need to bypass them ("Rogue" posits conspirators trained on nuclear-weapons, but not trained adequately); the authors make a good case for a missile explosion and a thin one for an explosion caused by attempted launch - ignoring any other hardware failure like the one involving a prototype SS-7 ICBM that killed over 100 people in 1961, or a missile tube failure involved in the loss of K-219 in 1986 (K-219 rates nary a mention in "Rogue").

Though they claim that the attack was meant to frame the Chinese, "Rogue" lacks any evidence needed to point to China: K-129 was an advanced member of a class of subs found only in Soviet service; crewed by uniformed Soviet sailors and armed with Soviet missiles. The authors never demonstrate that the Chinese even possessed an operational SLBM system as early as 1968 (most sources place the first successful test launch of China's first ICBM in 1978, with initial ops in '83). The case falls apart when the authors try to explain how the Soviets would have refuted suspicions that the attack was their own.

Worst of all, "Rogue" tries to have its cake and eat it too - getting undue mileage by appearing well researched even when spending more time refuting sources than finding support in them - other sources are ridiculed when they clash with the authors' sources, without any concrete explanation as to why the author chose to believe one story over another. If the sea has harbored a secret of the K-129, this book does not reveal it.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Story But Long on Speculation, May 5, 2007

By 

M. L. Asselin (Bethesda, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. (Mass Market Paperback)

RED STAR ROGUE is an interesting account about a supposed rogue Soviet submarine that allegedly attempted a nuclear strike against Honolulu in 1968. The authors, lacking specific, corroborating information, engage in a considerable amount of speculation. Moreover, they cannot make a point or present a fact without repeating it at least once--usually within a couple of pages--causing this reader to lose patience. Remove the speculation and the repetition and you would have more of a pamphlet than a book. Nonethless, this book, despite its sensationalist tone, appears to be the most well researched account of this incident publicly available.