Stalking the Red Bear: The True Story of a U.S. Cold War Submarine's Covert Operations Against the Soviet Union

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Stalking the Red Bear is a true story about the U.S. Navy’s covert submarine espionage operations against the Soviet Union. Code-named Holystone, this top-secret operation began in the late 1940s and continued through the cold war and beyond the collapse of the USSR. Stalking the Red Bear tells how in the 1970s, arguably the most dangerous decade of the cold war, the U.S. nuclear-powered submarines collected visual, electronic, and acoustic intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. It also tells how the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered Sturgeon-class submarines, the workhorses of America’s undersea spy program, were developed, designed, and built. Most important of all, it explains how they functioned and cloaked themselves in virtual invisibility to avoid detection by the Soviets.

Stalking the Red Bear also looks at the doctrine and tactics of what the Soviet navy called “the struggle against submarines” and the U.S. Navy called antisubmarine warfare or ASW. Indeed, it was a struggle, as the Soviets for decades lagged far behind the United States in submarine and sonar technologies. In their mostly failed effort to thwart American cold war submarine operations in waters bordering Russia, the Soviets had to deploy submarines whose seaworthiness and reliability were questionable, to say nothing of the safety of their nuclear reactors and weapons. Stalking the Red Bear also examines other issues related to Holystone, such as the training U.S. and Soviet submariners underwent during the mid — cold war period, submarine weapons and tactics, and the effects of long deployments on submariners and their families. To place Holystone in its historical context, there is a brief look at some of the clandestine U.S.

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