Blind Mans Bluff

Adventure, ingenuity, courage and disaster beneath the sea: the remarkable reality of Cold War submarine warfare

In Blind Mans Bluff, veteran investigative journalist Sherry Sontag and award-winning New York Times reporter Christopher Drew reveal an extraordinary underwater world. Showing for the first time how the American Navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables, Sontag and Drew unveil new evidence that the Navy's own negligence might have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared with all hands at the height of the Cold War. They disclose for the first time details of the bitter war between the CIA and the Navy and how it threatened to sabotage one of America's most important undersea missions.

They tell the complete story of the audacious attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and how it was doomed from the start. And Sontag and Drew reveal how the Navy used the comforting notion of deep-sea rescue vehicles to hide operations that were more James Bond than Jacques Cousteau. Stretching from the years immediately after World War II to the post-Cold War new reality of warfare, Blind Mans Bluff reads like a spy thriller, but with one important difference - everything in it is true.