Dead in the Water

Soviet nuclear-powered submarines routinely ply the heavily trafficked sea-lanes off the U.S. East Coast, but few ever surface. Thus Navy pilots patrolling the Atlantic in a P-3C Orion antisubmarine aircraft early last Tuesday morning were astonished to sight a Soviet attack sub moving through rolling seas some 470 miles off the coast of South Carolina in the infamous Bermuda Triangle. The 341-ft.-long vessel was clearly having mechanical troubles, but it issued no international distress signal. Instead, the ship and its crew of about 90 men braved the winds and waves, bobbing, in the words of a U.S. officer, "like a Ping-Pong ball in a stormy bathtub." A Soviet intelligence ship eventually appeared to monitor the activities of the submarine and an American destroyer that was keeping watch over the stricken craft, while the queasy Soviet sailors waited for a salvage ship that eventually arrived from Cuba. Said a Pentagon spokesman during the uncomfortable hiatus: "She isn't going anywhere. She is dead in the water."

TIME has learned that the Victor III-class Soviet sub was forced to surface after its screw propellers became entangled in a 2-to 3-in.-thick steel undersea cable that was being used by a U.S. surveillance frigate to track the sub's movements. The mechanical mishap was I only the latest in a series of embarrassing setbacks for the Soviet fleet. In 1981 a diesel powered Soviet sub snooping in a restricted zone off the Swedish coast ran aground and had to be pulled to a safer anchor—age by Swedish tugboats. According to U.S. intelligence, another nuclear-powered attack sub sank in deep water last summer off the Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka.