On March 8, 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129, from the Golf-II class, mysteriously dark in the middle of the Pacific with the entire crew, 98 sailors. It was not until six years later, during the bailout of the ship by the American navy, that the K-129 finally reveals its most terrifying secrets …
February 1968, the Cold War was in full swing between the Soviet Union of Brejnev and the United States of America of Johnson. For each hour, hundreds of submarines from both camps rake the oceans with a view to an atomic war. Among these submersibles, there is the K-129, a diesel propulsion Soviet submarine capable of boarding up to three nuclear missiles.
On February 24, 1968, the K-129, with a reinforced crew of fifteen newcomers, left the naval base of Vilioutchinsk (extreme is from Russia) for a simple 70-day patrol mission. Therefore, no radio communication will be issued by the submarine to the high command of the Pacific fleet.
The Soviet navy then deploys an important naval and air quota in order to find, as quickly as possible, the disappeared ship. Because in the eyes of the USSR General Staff, there are only two reasons for a submarine no longer gives news: the first is to desert, the second is to declare a war …
It was not until August of the same year that the USS Halibut locates the wreck of the K-129 at more than 4,800 meters deep and less than 620 nautical miles from the US base of Midway. But what could he have happened to the Soviet submarine to sink out of his patrol area and so close to the American coast?
When President Nixon orders to recover the wreck in 1974, the CIA decided to stifle the case, jointly with the Russian secret services. But in 2005, the political investigator Kenneth Sewell published Red Star Rogue, a book where he issued a very plausible theory on the real intensions of K-129.
The work says that the submarine was diverted by KGB radicals in order to launch a missile on Midway and trigger a nuclear war between the United States … and China. The Chinese navy had indeed just acquired a good number of submarines in the Golf-II class.
Through a series of unconventional and unauthorized maneuvers, the putschists tried to pass the K-129 for a Chinese building. In other words, they wanted to launch the only kind of war that the USSR could not lose: a war from which it would be absent!
An almost perfect plan which would undoubtedly have resulted if the commander and crew members of the K-129 had not mutated. The latter would have sabotaged one of the missiles so that it does not reach its target or that it explodes in its launch silo, which has probably passed.
The other hypothesis put forward by specialists is that the Soviet Chief of Staff ordered the K-133, one of the best attack submarines in the November class, to find and neutralize the K-129 before the irreparable occurred. Although the K-133 patrolled in the surroundings at the time of the drama, no evidence has come to corroborate this theory.
Even today, the mystery hangs over the K-129 and on a strange Soviet nuclear missile, found intact at the bottom of the water, a few nautical nauticals from Hawaii…
Mohamed Habib Ladjimi
Tunis-Hebdo of 10/26/2020
