Sounds like a lot of chop-busting interviews with this book, but I found it to be an interesting read. The one thing that chaffed me was the fact the Kindle does not support footnotes, which I think would add a lot to this book. You've got to take the author at face value to get through it and bear in mind, as with all "intelligence"-type books, that there's going to be some horse$h|+ thrown in there. I'm surprised nobody's made this book into a movie--I thought it would make a better screenplay than "The Hunt for Red October".

What a joke. Two wannabe authors make up some fiction based on John Craven's own wonderful ability to invent things in his head. There is no basis for any of this conjecture. The title is nuts. Who is the rogue?? Why does a tragic accident that takes down an sub and her brave crew get labeled a rogue?? Because why?? A fantasy?? Does anyone believe this 'sea story'???? A true sad waste of paper?? Not to mention very disrespectful of the professionals who went down with their ship.

Best, pb

A few months back I had lunch with an old friend and the conversation turned to the Cuban Missile Crisis. "That was the biggest event of the Cold War, don't you think?" my friend commented. I concurred. Then I read this outstanding and revelatory work of narrative history. RED STAR ROGUE makes a persuasive claim that the biggest -- yet heretofore unknown to the general public -- event of the Cold War was in fact this: In 1968 the Soviet submarine K-129 went rogue and sank while attempting to launch a nuke at Pearl Harbor. Sound preposterous? It won't after you read this. Sewell, a veteran of the USS Parche, and Richmond, an experienced and respected journalist, have made a compelling case for the above based on political and economic factors of the time, but also very specific nuclear, structural, engineering, and military personnel-related details garnered from a trove of only recently released US Naval documents and Soviet archives, and from extensive interviews with intelligence sources in both the US and Russia. The book is well sourced in the back and the adventurous reader can follow-up with the details on his or her own. Those of you compelled by this will also want to read Sewell's follow-up book, ALL HANDS DOWN.

This is a really neat book. Don't let your expectations exceed the quality of how the material is written. This book is poorly composed however the ideas fiction or non-fiction is quite fascinating. The story will keep you on your toes if you can ignore the writer's inexperience. I suggest any person looking for a good read at night before bed or on a rainy day, grab this book and talk about it with friends or your partner!

I enjoyed reading this book. I have also enjoyed reading the informed reviews of it afterward. Their technical points are well taken, and do tend to undermine the author's credibility.

However, does that mean that it didn't happen? If it didn't, how would one explain the diplomatic virtuoso performance of Kissinger in using the information about the alleged incident? He couldn't have bullied the Russians, claiming to have information about the incident, if the Russians knew it had never happened. I was never a fan of his before this read, but if the incident did happen like the book said, I take my hat off to the man.

All in all, it's a good sea story. Enough truth to make it believable, and enough non-truth to make a good discussion of it. Even if it turns out to be more fiction than fact, it was still worth the read for me.

Little by little the whole story behind the things that happened during the Cold War will come out....and it will be shocking!

This book is a great crack at the door of knowledge of some of those stories, a great read.

As another reviewer, William F. Twist, states, authors Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond claimed the acoustic signatures of the Soviet diesel submarine, K-129, recorded by a PERMIT Class submarine in 1968 were processed by land-based Cray supercomputers when the first such computer was not completed until 1976,

In 1968, the year K-129 sank, and for several years thereafter, any recordings of Soviet submarines made by US submarines would have been sent to the Naval Scientific and Techincal Intelligence Center (NAVSTIC) in Building 52 on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. Then, as now, such detection events were analyzed by Intelligence Research Specialists with near photographic memories. Computers were not then, nor are they now, used to evaluate such data. (This may come as a shock to those who believe computers are capable of solving almost all complex analytical problems.) As head of the Branch within NAVSTIC responsible for the analysis of all such data, I can state categorically that no K-129 acoustic signature information was received from any US submarine in 1968.

This, and other egregious errors documented by Twist, indicate Sewell and Richmond engaged in the complete fabrication of events to support their conspiracy theory and sell the book.

Sadly, this has become common practice by those who must be called "hack journalists." The motive: sell books to the technically uniformed and conspiracy gullible public. A more recent example is Ed Offley's book, SCORPION DOWN, which propounds unfounded conspiracy theories and ignores the pressure-collapsed condition of the wreckage on the bottom and the complete absence of any damage consistent with a torpedo attack.

SCORPION was lost because of an onboard problem the crew could not overcome before the submarine sank to collapse depth. The Soviets were miles away minding their own business. Sewell's next book, "All HANDS DOWN: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS SCORPION," due out 15 April 2008, will doubtless follow the same conspiracy story line although we can expect a few new fabrications to convince the buying public that Sewell's book is "better" than Offley's. We can also expect other hack journalists to provide back-of-the-dust-jacket reviews praising Sewell's effort as "a daring expose that reveals what the US Navy has for decades kept hidden" or some such drivel. This is a neat - but not very nice - reciprocal (quid pro quo) arrangement among such journalists: "You endorse my book and I'll endorse yours." This leaves the prospective buyer without an objective assessment of such books until they are critically reviewed - and their technical weaknesses exposed - in limited distribution publications such as NAVY TIMES or the US NAVAL INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS.

As another reviewer, William F. Twists, states, authors Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond claimed the acoustic signatures of K-129 recorded by a PERMIT Class submarine in 1968 were processed by land-based Cray supercomputers when the first such computer was not completed until 1976,

In 1968, the year K-129 sank, and for several years thereafter, any recordings of Soviet submarines made by US submarines were sent to the Naval Scientific and Techincal Intelligence Center (NAVSTIC) in Building 52 on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. Then, as now, such detection events were analyzed by Intelligence Research Specialists with near photographic memories. Computers were not then, nor are they now, used to evaluate such data. As head of the Branch within NAVSTIC responsible for the analysis of all such data, I can state categorically that no K-129 acoustic signature information was received from any US submarine in 1968.

This, and other errors documented by Twist, indicate Sewell and Richmond engaged in the complete fabrication of events to support their conspiracy theory and sell the book.

Sadly, this has become common practice by those who much be called "hack journalists." The motive: sell books to the technically uniformed and conspiracy gullible public. A more recent example is Ed Offley's book, SCORPION DOWN, which ignores the pressure-collapsed condition of the wreckage on the bottom and the complete absence of any damage consistent with a torpedo attack.

SCORPION was lost because of an onboard problem the crew could not overcome before the submarine sank to collapse depth. The Soviets were miles away minding their own business. The title of Sewell's next book, "All HANDS DOWN" The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS SCORPION," due out 15 April 2008, will doubtless follow the same story line although we can expect a few new fabrications to convince the buying public that Sewell's book is better than Offley's. We can also expect other hack journalists to provide back-of-the-dust-jack reviews praising Sewell's effort as "a daring expose," that reveals "what the US Navy has for decades kept hidden" or other such drivel.

B. Rule

Many reviews have already summarized the theme of this book, so I will

not repeat. I think the story is interesting, but there are just too many

things in this book which is suspicious that one can hardly believe it.



One point I would like to put forward is the following: the author claim

that the missile launch and sunk of the boat took place at an exact

integer longitude and latitude. He said that this is to trick

the US to believe it is from a Chinese sub, which could only launch missiles from such exact positions. This hardly believable. There is not

anything special about exact longitude or latitude. Missile launch can

easily be made from any longitude and latitude, it requires no more complicated math than a simple interpolation table, and is much simpler than navigating the submarine itself.

Many reviews have already summarized the theme of this book, so I will
not repeat. I think the story is interesting, but there are just too many
things in this book which is suspicious that one can hardly believe it.

One point I would like to put forward is the following: the author claim
that the missile launch and sunk of the boat took place at an exact
integer longitude and latitude. He said that this is to trick
the US to believe it is from a Chinese sub, which could only launch missiles from such exact positions. This hardly believable. There is not
anything special about exact longitude or latitude. Missile launch can
easily be made from any longitude and latitude, it requires no more complicated math than a simple interpolation table, and is much simpler than navigating the submarine itself.

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.

I have a hard time making up my mind on this one...

Either RSR is a bunch of paranoid nonsense or its one of the most facinating episodes from the Cold War. I really don't have the expertise to know whether the authors claims are accurate and the "facts" are connected with a lot of assumptions and conjecture; still, the story does seem to have a ring of truth to it.

Did a rogue Soviet submarine attempt to nuke Pearl Harbor and frame China? It seems possible but I suppose we'll never really know. Even so, the mere possibility that it could be true makes RSR a compelling read.

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.

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.

I had no idea that this actually had taken place. Kenneth Sewell tells a great story that rivals any Clancy or big screen movie I have read/seen. But the difference: This event actaully happened.

I highly recommend this book.

Sharply divergent opinions on this book. I do not generally subscribe to conspiracy theories but I'm willing to make an exception for this one. Red Star Rogue makes a convincing case that, March 7, 1968, an attempt was made to attack Pearl Harbor. Were this to be so, much of the front page news that we remember was fiction. Lots of questions get answered in surprizing ways. This is plausable.

This story seems like it would be a Tom Clancy cold war, naval thriller.
Some of it reminded me of the Hunt for Red October. The difference: this is a true story.

An ex-US submariner is the author. He investigated an almost forgotten incident that occured in the Pacific near Hawaii in the chaotic period of early 1968. The north Vietnamese had just launched the Tet offensive broadening the scope and horror of the Viet Nam war, the North Koreans had captured the US spyship, Pueblo and were holding its crew -- and a Soviet missile-sub goes missing and then sinks near Pearl Harbor - far too close to Pearl Harbor.

Sewell is not in the same class as Clancy as a writer and at times he seems to repeat certain points over and over (the fact that the experienced and respected Soviet captain and his 2nd failed to file the details of the crew prior to leaving port is stated about a dozen times as is the fact that the crew consisted of 98 sailors and officers rather than the usual 81-83 men complement) but these repeated points are crucial to support his theory of the underlying event.

A very interesting book that can truly chill anyone alive at the time when you pause to realize how close we came to a true nuclear war.

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.

I found the book fascinating and probably the most interesting book I've read in a long time...maybe ever.

It's about the K-129 russian sub that is widely known as the sub the CIA attempted to raise from the ocean floor. I've seen previous documentaries on it and they always stated that only a protion of the sub was recovered. I found that hard to believe that after building a ship and assembling a crew that they would simply give up after one attempt when a protion of the sub broke off during recovery. According to the book this is a CIA cover story. The author states that almost all of the sub was recovered. Why did they go to all this trouble to recover an older diesel sub? It was for political blackmail states the author, and he lays down a pretty convincing case. The real mission of the sub was and is too sensitive to acknowledge.
The book states that the sub was taken over by KBG agents (11-15 crew members were added at the last minute) directed by hard liners in Moscow to mimick a chinese nuclear attack on Pearl Harbor to start a Chinese-American war. He makes a good case for this,...when the sub was about 350 miles from Pearl to simulate a less capable Chinese sub, when they could have launch from 700-800 miles away. Another part of this was they also surfaced to launch when they didn't have to.
To reveal that a superpower lost control over it's nuclear arsenal is alot more damning than any code book or other military hardware onboard. That was why Nixon went to all that trouble to recover K-129, and why the govt still keeps many secrets on this. The book's message is still revelant today as was during the cold war since many or most of the former USSR's nuclear weapons are still around, and probably under less control today than was back then.