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The "Lost" Pacific Beach Detection, Winter 60-61?

By Bruce Rule - Nov 27, 2014

The Underwater Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Submarines and the Risk of Nuclear War National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 399 (see linked site) states:

(quote) Since 27 September 1962, the U.S. Navy had been tracking the subs using listening posts that detected electronically-compressed "burst radio transmissions" between Soviet Navy command posts and the submarines themselves. The messages could not be deciphered but the location from where they were transmitted could be identified. (end quote)

In the 1961-62 period, the writer, then at COSL in Norfolk, was informed that interception of such burst transmissions indicated Soviet submarines occasionally deployed to the eastern Pacific to patrol near the US west coast.

As previously discussed, had those deployments been detected by the System during snorkel-mode operations, they would not have been recognized because their cavitation blade-rate signatures did not match the content of any “signature library” then available.

There was; however, one detection by the William array at Pacific Beach that circumstances indicate was a valid detection of a Type 1 Soviet diesel submarine, probably a FOXTROT Class.

A P2V ASW surveillance flight had a disappearing radar contact (sinker) that correlated in time and position (bearing) with a William detection of two sources at 26 Hz with diffuse second and third harmonics. The target, whIch was held for about 30 mins, was sent to DPU who evaluated it “Not US or Known Friendly.” No DPU analysis documents remais.

In retrospect, the acoustic sources were two cavitating propellers at 260 rpm (circa eight knots) detected as the submarine dove and opened the P2V datum.

Can anyone add to this information?