Crash dive!
Revealed to public 42 years on... how 2 Cold War submarines collided in loch
IT was the height of the Cold War, when the world’s two great superpowers kept a close and suspicious eye on each other’s movements.
But not close enough, it would seem.
It has just been revealed after more than 40 years that US and Soviet submarines collided in Scottish waters.
In November 1974, the American Poseidon class submarine – capable of carrying 16 nuclear ballistic missiles – collided with the USSR vessel outside Holy Loch, near Dunoon, Argyll.
Details from the ‘secret eyes only’ cable reveal the Soviet submarine was waiting outside the inlet, where the US Navy kept an outpost between 1961 and 1992, in preparation to stalk the American craft.
The 425ft USS James Madison and its Russian counterpart were both forced to break cover by surfacing following the high stakes collision.
The accident has been revealed in a newly released CIA document of corand
‘The Soviet boat submerged again’
respondence from the US ‘Situation Room’ to its embassy in Bucharest.
It is written by a lieutenant-general and addressed personally to then President Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The one-page message written on November 3 reads: ‘Have just received word from the Pentagon that one of our Poseidon submarines has just collided with a Soviet submarine.
‘The SSBN James Madison was departing Holy Loch to take up station when it collided with a Soviet submarine waiting outside the port to take up trail.
‘Both submarines surfaced and the Soviet boat subsequently submerged again.
‘There is no report yet of the extent of the damage or other details.’
Although it was officially declassified technically free to see in 2009, it is the first time the message has been viewed by the public.
It is one of 13million pages of documents now being published online by the CIA.
Formerly the papers were only available to view in person at a tiny Maryland library, meaning very few of the details ever made it to print.
But after a lawsuit from transparency campaigners, the CIA has relented and begun the lengthy process of publishing the declassified papers online.
The collection of documents includes details of UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the CIA Stargate programme – a long-time favourite interest of conspiracy theorists.
The CIA’s director of information management said: ‘Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography.’