Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.

by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond

Book Overview

March 7, 1968: Several hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, the nuclear-armed K-129 surfaces and then sinks; all of its crewmen and officers perish at sea. Who was commanding the rogue Russian sub? What... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743261127
• ISBN13: 9780743261128
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Reviewing "Red Star Rogue"

For those of you who now dismiss the Cold War as just international rivalry at its most intense, this factual and very well written account of what almost happened to us via a rogue Russian missile-launching submarine and the resulting coverups (including the buiding and use of Hughes "Glomar Explorer") should be required reading. It wasn't the Cuban Missile crisis that almost started World War III...it was this, an attempt gone wrong to fire a Russian nuclear missile against the west coast of the US. A stark and frightening cautionary tale, indeed!

Pearl Harbor, part II

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.

Credible

I pulled my copy of The Silent War from the book shelf and read the chapter where Dr. Craven talks about K-129, the submarine featured in Red Star Rogue. I counted the times Craven mentions the status of the Soviet submarine. In chapter fifteen Dr. Craven states that the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 was either rogue, or had the highest probability of being a rogue, no less than SEVEN TIMES! I'm not a submariner, but I am a retired naval officer and history buff. As far as I'm concerned, a submarine would go rogue for only two reasons, to defect or to start a war. Soviet submarine officers were the elite of the Soviet Navy, dedicated family men, loyal to a fault. I don't believe this submarine was defecting. I found that Red Star Rogue made a solid case for the failed rogue submarine attack on Hawaii. But after reading chapter 15 in Craven's book, The Hunt for Red September, I've elevated its credibility to a ranking of the highest probability.

Well Done

As reader of many conspiracy theories most of which have little or no substanciated facts...the Author has certainly done his homework to make sure there is little doubt over the factualisation of the book...makes compelling reading... my previous readings of project Jennifer left me with plenty of unanswered questions which this book seems to piece together.....A GREAT read..........

Not Much for Conspiracy Theories, But ....

History records that in March 1968, President Johnson, succumbing to mounting pressures from the war in Vietnam, declined to stand for re-election. But Johnson may have had more than Vietnam on his mind. Earlier that fateful month, a nuclear-armed Soviet Golf-II submarine sank just 350 miles from Hawaii. What the sub was doing there and how it met its demise may never be proven definitively. But author Kenneth Sewell presents a convincing case -- though one not without caveat, conjecture and speculation -- that the sub was a rogue executing a furtive mission to provoke a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China. As Sewell presents it, the KGB commandeered the sub, K-129, with the intention of delivering a nuclear strike on Pearl Harbor. The audacious plan -- masterminded by KGB Boss Yuri Andropov and his mentor, Mikhail Suslov -- would be executed in a way that pointed responsibility at China, capitalizing on growing U.S. fears of a bellicose Mao Zedong. A U.S.-developed fail-safe mechanism, designed to prevent an unauthorized missile launch, is all the prevented the sinister plan from succeeding. The Johnson Administration had shared the fail-safe technology with Moscow only a couple of years before the incident. Instead of incinerating Pearl and a good part of Oahu, the nuclear missile destroyed the K-129, sending all 98 crewmen to their final resting place at the bottom of the Pacific. Sewell relates at length the K-129 incident's diplomatic impact -- he speculates that it facilitated both Nixon's detente with the Soviets and his rapprochement with the Chinese -- as well as elaborate CIA efforts to recover the enemy sub (in violation of international law) and to keep the truth about the renegade sub's motives from ever being revealed. I don't go in much for conspiracy theories. And a casual reader has no way of knowing how much of Sewell's tale is truth and how much is fiction. But the case he makes certainly sounds plausible - or at least possible.