On page 206 of THE SILENT WAR; THE COLD WAR BATTLE BENEATH THE SEA, author John Craven states: "When ((the GOLF Class Soviet diesel submarine (K-129)) passed (longitude) 180, it should have been further north, at a latitide of 45 degrees (north), or more than 300 nautical miles away (from 40N where the wreckage was found). If that was a navigational mistake, it would have be an error of historic proportions. Thus, if the sub was nowhere in the vicinity of where the Soviets supposed it to be, there would be a high probability, if not a certainty, that the submarine was a rogue, off on its own, in grave disobedience of its orders."

This conjecture has been seized upon by others as the basis for a theory that the K-129 was a "rogue" mission that sank while trying to launch a nuclear missile at Pearl Harbor in an effort to trigger a war between the U.S. and China.

A now declassified Navy document (1) indicates that after following a dog-leg deployment track (first south, then east) from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky - and not the great circle route apparently assumed by Craven - K-129 proceeded directly east along 40N and was found by the USS HALIBUT only six (not 300) nautical miles north of its planned deployment track.

Still others have altered Craven's now discredited 1968 theory that SCORPION was sunk by her own torpedo to make a Soviet torpedo the agent of disaster. Now declassified reports (2, 3) of analyses of photographic evidence of the SCORPION wreckage and acoustic detections of the disaster establish conclusively that SCORPION collapsed at a depth of 2000 feet and there were no explosive events from a torpedo or any other cause. These reports, published in 1970, have never been acknowledged by Craven who apparently still maintains an explosion sank SCORPION, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

After 39 years, it is time for John Craven to admit his mistakes in THE SILENT WAR and acknowledge his generative responsibility for the unfounded conjectures that have been published about K-129 and SCORPION.

References:

(1) Declassified Navy document: Notes by CAPT Joseph P. Kelly, USN from a meeting held at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, DC on 20 May 1968 to determine the location of the lost Soviet submarine K-129.

(2) Declassified Navy document: Naval Ordnance Laboratory Report 69-160 of 20 January 1970, USS SCORPION (SSN 589) RESULTS OF NOL DATA ANALYSIS, by Robert S. Price and Ermine A. Christian

(3) Declassified Navy document: EVALUATION OF DATA AND ARTIFACTS RELATED TO USS SCORPION (SSN 589) Prepared for Presentation to the CNO SCORPION Technical Advisory Group by the Structural Analysis Group, 29 June 1970, by Peter.M. Palermo, CAPT Harry Jackson, USN, Robert S. price, et al..

OK, so it's a biography, not a history book or novel. However, that's not an excuse for shameless self-congratulation. The "good stuff" in this book is due to the subject material itself, not how its presented. There are better works on this subject. And to top it all off, the numerous grammatical errors point to the less than professional nature of this book. I expected better.

"The Silent War" adds more grist to the ever-churning mill of rumors about the Soviet submarine that sank about 1,500 miles from Maui in 1968.
John Craven, a civilian who was chief scientist for the Navy's Special Projects Office, proposes that the sub may have been a rogue and that it was preparing to launch a one-megaton missile at Oahu.
Craven infers this, in part, because photos of the wreckage seem to show that the conventional explosive that surrounds the nuclear warhead exploded, leading to the loss of the sub. Such an explosion is one kind of "fail-safe" device: If some unauthorized tampering is done, better to blow up the missile than have it armed and dispatched.
Craven says the probability that the sub was a rogue is low but he seems to take it seriously. His scenario does not explain how the rogue crew hoped to reach Oahu with a missile whose range is thought to have been 750 miles.
Craven, still bound by security regulations, says he isn't revealing any secrets. A comparison of "The Silent War" to "Blind Man's Bluff," the 1999 book about underwater spying, and to "Spy Sub," a 1997 novelized version of the hunt for the Soviet sub by one of the participants, leaves plenty of mystery.
"60 Minutes" reported the sub's number was K129, but Craven says survivors of the crew said it was something else. In "Spy Sub," Roger Dunham calls it PL-751.
Whatever it was, Hawaii was involved at least after the sinking, if not before.
The spy sub USS Halibut ("Viperfish" in Dunham's book), which Craven's group supplied the still-secret hardware for, practiced its hunting off Lahaina, Maui, in the early '70s. The Glomar Explorer, the CIA ship that tried to lift the sub off the seafloor, was much noticed in Hawaii around 1974.
Craven, as interested in policy as in ocean technology, provides a novel reinterpretation of that episode.
According to him, the Navy could have explored the sunken sub with supersecret underwater craft, and nobody would ever have known. Instead, the Nixon administration pulled the Navy off, gave undersea intelligence to the CIA (which meant that Craven had nothing to do with Glomar) and -- besides blowing $500 million on a (probably) failed mission -- nearly ruined the advance of oceanic technology.
The argument, which like most of Craven's views is neither simple nor obvious, is that the cover story for the Glomar -- that it was going to recover manganese nodules off the deep ocean floor -- was stupid.
It certainly was. By 1974, it was known that you could not make money bringing up lobsters worth $5 a pound from 1,000 feet deep, so it was absurd to think it would be worthwhile to bring up nodules worth a penny a pound from 15,000 feet.
Nevertheless, according to Craven's view, the ocean scientists of the rich countries were left "misunderstanding the limits of ocean resources," which led to "the waste of precious development resources."
Maybe so, but if the people in charge were stupid enough to fall for the CIA trick, that raises the question whether they would have done any better if they had deployed their manganese-hunting millions in some other direction.
Possibly not. After leaving the Navy, Craven became a dean at the University of Hawaii, where he became project manager for two of the most hare-brained schemes ever hatched by a state government famous for fiascos, a "floating city" off Waikiki and the embarrassing ocean thermal energy conversion project at Keahole.
Craven, whose family tradition had him down from birth for the Naval Academy, couldn't get appointed. After obtaining a doctorate at the University of Iowa, he ended up in the middle of Navy business anyway, an opportunity for which he is grateful.
The earlier part of "The Silent War" concerns the development of the Polaris nuclear war deterrent. "A nation choosing a strategy of nuclear deterrence cannot also choose a strategy that would commit the nation to a tactical nuclear war," he writes, which not everybody understood, then or now.
Via another complex argument, Craven asserts that the undersea cold war allowed the United States to let the U.S.S.R. know it knew in the 1980s that the Kremlin was losing command and control of its deterrent forces, and such an understanding brought about the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
In a short review, it is not possible to give the full weight of Craven's argument on this subject. You will have to read it yourself, which is worth doing anyhow, as "The Silent War" is also a fine mix of derring-do, good old American know-how and personal strife and achievement.

John Pina Craven's The Silent War is written by a genius, a patriot and an important figure of our Cold War victory. Those who have criticized the book on the basis of its chronicling of the author's recollection of his own role in the events depicted must suffer from their own inferiority complexes; Craven was there, and he played the role he played. That's history, folks. Blind Man's Bluff, which predated his book and which he did NOT write, confirms this. Finally, as one who has had the privilege and pleasure of sitting down with him and hearing some of the exploits of those he writes about, I can report that he is a true patriot and a man of peace, who did what he did to prevent war at all costs - billions but worth every penny.

I was looking forward to reading this book. Made it almost through Chapter 2 and decided I was done. This book is more about J.P. Craven than it is about the Cold War and the courageous and commendable service that was provided by the Navy's Silent Service. If you want to know about how Craven saved the world, this is the book for you otherwise it is a great disappointment. Recommend reading (or re-reading) Blind Man's Bluff before opening this autobiography.

Considering the security restrictions Dr. Craven had to adhear to, the information he was able to provide is amazing. However, the reader needs to sometimes read between the lines. The author has outfoxed his minders!

I don't understand why this book was published by a reputable publisher. Normally this sort of thing would only be published by the vanity press at the author's expense. The whole thing is mostly a bunch of anecdotes that are supposed to depict the author as indispensible and important. There are too many passages like this: "I picked up the phone. On the other end was Admiral Rickover. He says 'Cragen, you dirty old sea-dog. We are completely screwed unless you help us. Can you come to the rescue once again ?'". I'm sure Cragen has had an interesting life, but they way he's telling it, it's quite boring, because he repeats over and over "I am great. I am smart. I am important. Admiral Rickover needs me. I am great."
Fortunately I got it on clearance at B&N for a couple of dollars, and that's about what it's worth.