Sweden: You Must Go Home Again

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Harbor Master Uffe Jansson, who went aboard the sub, later said he found the atmosphere "panic-loaded." Said Jansson: "About ten of the men were running in circles around each other." But Gunnar Rasmusson, a Swedish submarine commander for eight years, was sympathetic to the Soviets. Said he: "It's torture to hear how the boat in hard weather slams on the rocks lying right under it. The sound rings through the whole boat. You can't stand still, you can't eat, you can't drink. To be idle locked in a submarine can break anyone."

Finally, after two hours of maneuvering, four Swedish tugboats managed to shunt the sub into a nearby haven.

Even then, the Soviets remained skittish: 31 hours after the rescue, signal flares lit up the night sky. The Swedes dispatched another rescue team. It found no emergency, just anxious crewmen who wanted to know the whereabouts of Commander Gushin and his navigator. Asked one Soviet sailor: "Are they your prisoners?"

Hardly. After his first lengthy questioning, which left the Swedes "not satisfied," Gushin, on orders from his superiors, demanded that further interrogations take place aboard the sub. He continued to stick to his story of flawed navigational equipment. Swedish officials boarded the sub and found the navigational gear in order. They also discovered a surprise.

Huddled below decks was the head of the entire Soviet submarine flotilla at Baltiysk.

His presence fueled speculation that the submarine might have been eavesdropping on communications traffic at Karlskrona, or laying underwater navigational beacons in the tricky waters around the Blekinge archipelago, or updating Soviet knowledge of the area (especially since the Swedes habitually misdraw public charts of the sensitive waters, precisely to confuse the Soviets).

The din grew louder with the Swedish announcement that their investigators had become certain that uranium 238 was aboard the sub, leading to the accusation that it probably carried nuclear weapons. To the Swedish charge, the Soviets replied only that the vessel carried the "necessary weapons and ammunition."

The nuclear discovery undermined Moscow's intensive courtship of the Scandinavian countries, aimed at banning nuclear weapons from their territory as a matter of principle. It was the final embarrassment in ten days of humiliation.

Normally, a submarine crew, weary of tight quarters, cannot wait to get back to home port. But as Commander Gushin and his crew headed out to sea last week, the voyage of 200 miles to Baltiysk and the waiting Soviet interrogators must have seemed far, far too short.

—By George Russell. Reported by Mary Johnson/Stockholm