Sea Control - Sea Control 543 - The U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement with Dr. David Winkler

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Links1.  Preventing Incidents at Sea: The History of the INCSEA Concept, by David F. Winkler, Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, 2008.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. David Winkler, and we're going to be discussing his book about a little-known accord between the U.S. and Soviet navies. The book is entitled Preventing Incidents at Sea, the History of the Ink Seat Concept. So, David, welcome back. Could you remind the audience about your background? please. Oh, okay. Well, I got my commission in the Navy through the Penn State Navy ROTC and was on active duty for 10 years. And then I got my commission in 1980. So when we won the

Cold War, I got chopped into the reserves where I served for another 18 years. While I was in the reserves. I worked and got my PhD at American University in 1998, worked with the Naval Historical Foundation as their staff historian for about 24, yeah, 24, 25 years. That organization decommissioned two years ago, but since then, I had an opportunity to teach at the Naval Academy, work as a chair of the Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and currently an adjunct professor at the Naval War College, college distance education here, teaching here in the Washington area, strategy of war class.

And got, I guess, two books already out this year, two more coming. But the first book I published was on my dissertation, which was on the Incidence at Sea Agreement, which is what we're going to talk about today. Well, thanks again for coming on. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. How did you become aware of ING-C? Well, I think it was firsthand. First, I was on the USS Suribachi, an ammunition ship that

during my time on board between 1980 and 83, we made three deployments to the Mediterranean. And so we had an ample opportunity to see the Soviet 5th Disguiser firsthand. And when we're in a formation with the carrier, a Soviet warship or AGI would always take place on the screen of the formation to keep an eye on us. So we had interactions with them. We had a signal book on the bridge, you know, a flag signal, a voice to communicate with the Russians on intent. And so I became aware of the instances agreement while on board the Suribachi. And then I was also in charge of a military detachment on USNS Navasota. And we had real opportunities to interact with the Russians, the Soviets of Vladivostok.

There was a 1984, I think we did, I think, an exercise with three carriers, you know, simulating attacks. This is part of John Layman's maritime strategy. And the Russians came out with aircraft, ships, and we were communicating with them fast and furious on our intentions. It was remarkable to me that we were able to peacefully engage in business during our exercises and communicating to the Soviets what we're doing. and making our intentions know that, you know, that we, and I began to think, okay, how did this all come about? And I got, when I was in St. Louis, later on active duty, I was the XO of the Reserve Center out there. And I was getting a degree in international affairs at Washington University. So I decided to take this on as a thesis. And, you know, I requested some documents,

didn't get really much but i had a chance to do some interviews uh i interviewed a former david war college uh president ron kirk who was part of our delegation he was like the head of our delegation's aide john warner uh who was secretary of navy yeah he gave me some background actually i'd met with the then senator warner he uh you know told me some really good stories about negotiating the agreement and after uh you know i started to turn in my thesis paper And then I got boxes in the mail from the State Department in response to my Freedom of Information Act request. And I opened up the boxes and all the documentation was there. And I said, wow, I got the makings of the dissertation.

And, you know, for the next couple of years, you know, I worked on it. I got my degree in 98, and then with the Naval Institute, first published it in 2000 as Cold War at Sea. It got subsequently republished in Canada with Dalhousie under the book title that you read. And then it got published again by the Naval Institute in 2017 as under the title Incidents at Sea because they updated it to talk about what's going on in Asia with the Chinese. So if you don't mind going back to Navasota and Suribachi for a second, how would you characterize your interactions with the Russians at the time? Would you call those, would you say that those were professional interactions for the most part? And then were they actually responding to the communications that you all were sending? Oh, certainly. There was now there was one incident on the Suribachi where a Soviet destroyer came up and it was it had its turn pointed towards us.

And there was kind of panic because that's a violation of the agreement, okay? And I'm looking at this thinking to myself, you know, they're not going to fire a shot into an ammunition ship. You're talking about mutual suicide here. So I kind of gave them a pass on that. And it turned out that I think they were doing maintenance on their gun mount. They just didn't realize that they were violating the agreement. Now, somebody was taking a picture of that. Oh, by the way, in today's, you know, media, that could have been posted.

And next thing you know, we have a world, you know, incident. But, you know, back then, and this is a challenge nowadays. You do have this, you know, ability to project, you know, as things are happening. You didn't have back then. So that was one case. We signaled to the Russians and they acknowledged that, oops, our bad. And then when I was in the Sea of Japan, this Soviet, looked like it was a minesweeper, came up alongside. uh and you know we were you know signaling each other and uh uh they i was i i actually was up on

the uh bridge it was like november i'm freezing i have uh my bridge coat on and the soviets they're on their bridge when they got their fur coats with the sable hats and everything you know they they looked up at me and waved and i took a picture with my uh little uh canada you want uh you know for i guess intelligence collection purposes uh but you know we were we were exchanging signals and uh it it worked out fine how did you begin your research and why was the navy initially a little reluctant to support you well yeah the the reason why the navy was kind of reluctant to support me and i got this call from this captain at the pentagon and he was Lieutenant, you effing fired me.

You know, and what was interesting about the agreement is that it was very low key. The idea was that the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Navy were talking to each other every year during the Iranian administration, and they wanted to keep these discussions going, And they didn't want big world events to kind of cause the annual agreement to break up. And during the 1980s, this was really the only military-to-military discussions we had between the two sides because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the KLL-007 shootdown in 1983.

and you know they wanted to keep really low with the grass so that this wouldn't be something that okay retaliation we're going to cut these talks with the russians because we both sides are valued having this so you know having anything that publicized uh this court such as some graduate student's dissertation being made into a book was not seen you know what was not taken like lightly now as the uh with the you know and follows the soviet union um and uh with the you know relations going to be improving between the two countries uh suddenly the navy kind of turned around and said you know this is a success story that we ought to you know let this guy tell because uh there's other situations where you know that's going to apply this you know this

is a good template and you know they were actually looking at the middle east for example as an opportunity where uh you know two sides um you know this was the thing is is that naval officers on both sides uh had a common bond uh you know operating at sea so they could talk to each other in ways that you know politicians could so you know the idea of having professionals on the two sides talking to each other uh in resolving issues that and and quite frankly you know the russians would take a look at a situation and say you know our guy screwed up and they would be uh they would admit that uh and likewise we would do the same okay and you know so we would have political observers uh sitting out these talks they'd just be astounded that you know with the honesty that

you know assess the situation you know so you know the u.s navy really did not want to break that up so that was uh and that's and so they wanted to keep this very quiet and uh you know out of public attention at what point did the u.s navy and soviet navy begin to have regular confrontations well that starts back uh yeah i said the navies uh in the early 60s uh there were confrontations in the air and i talked about that my book around the soviet periphery during the 1950s because you know our we had uh reconnaissance aircraft you know patrolling along, poking, you know, the Soviets, you know, the air defenses and testing their radars and everything. But the confrontations really began.

I don't think the Cuban Missile Crisis was the driver. I think the deployments of George Washington-class SSBNs caused the Soviets to turn from a coastal defense navy that had come about with a cruise ship coming into power. I think Stalin had visions of a big Navy, but they went to coastal defense in the 1950s with missile boats and heavy submarines and then realized that, hey, these ballistic missile submarines are a threat to us, so we need to build some blue water capability. So they started deploying in places we deployed, such as the Mediterranean, the Western Pacific, the North Atlantic, and keeping an eye on our carriers, which at the time, you know, were capable of launching a nuclear bomb-carrying aircraft. So they wanted to be in a position to interdict, you know, any, you know, naval actions against, you know, the Soviet Union. And thus, you know, they would start getting disruptive, cutting in front of our ships, especially off of Vietnam, okay? They would have these spy ships that, you know, would interfere with flight operations, for example, at Yankee Station. What vessels were typically involved in these incidents, and did you notice any patterns or typical behavior?

uh most of these instances were involving these uh ships were uh agis you know initially they were like russian uh fishing vessels that were uh converted you know to have listening uh you know surveillance capability and uh and norman palmer just uh you know uh wrote a book about it. He actually was quite amazed at how little had been written on Soviet intelligence collection ships.

The other was Soviet destroyers. We had a couple of incidents in the Sea of Japan in May of 1967 that really on back-to-back days

you had Soviet destroyers bumping up against the U.S. Walker, a destroyer that was flanking, I think it was the Hornet conducting ASW operations in the Sea of Japan. I think we were having success in tracking the Russian submarine. What this destroyer was trying to do was disrupt, you know, our tracking capability, our tracking cohort. So that actually, you know, led to, like, House Minority Leader Gerald Walsh saying, hey, what are we going to do about this? Maybe we should change our rules of engagement so that we fire on the shooting destroyers.

Sergei Gorshkov, the admiral of the Soviet fleet, was called a warmonger. And at this time, this is when we actually sent out the United States and said, hey, what about having safety at sea talks? We approached the Soviets about having some sort of talks on this. And the Soviets kind of ignored those approaches until November 19th. So that leads directly to my next question. Who actually initiated the call for safety at sea talks? It sounds from your description, it came mostly from the U.S. side, but is that accurate? Initially from the United States.

But in November of 1970, there was a collision off Cyprus between a British aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, and a Soviet destroyer, where the Soviet destroyer crushed in front of the carrier. And, you know, it didn't pull back and everything, but the law of gross tonnage applies. Soviets lost four sailors. So in the day, I think the day afterwards, the Soviets approached, I think, charged their affairs at the embassy in Moscow saying, hey, let's talk about safety at sea. Now, interestingly, it was a collision between the Brits and the Soviets that drove the Soviets to center this. And I think from the Soviet perspective, they were fleeting up these officers to command these brand new destroyers and cruisers rather than fleeting over their older commanders who had served on coastal defense boats. So I think they had a maturity question that they had to resolve. And I think they saw the need to put some rules in place to kind of restrain their Cossacks.

And, of course, we had some cowboys in our Navy who were kind of aggressive dealing with the Soviets, too. We would, for example, our aircraft, our carriers, buzz, fly real close at supersonic speeds and reportedly deploy tailhooks and rip wires from the overhead superstructure. I think there was one case where like a sonic boom knocked out fireworks and took out a Soviet cruiser operating here in Turkey. So it's, you know, it's not like we were angels either in this game at sea. So, yeah, so it was, they approached us in November of 1970 and we were kind of stunned. We kind of said, well, we're actually going to talk to these guys. There was actually some resistance in the Navy of, hey, that means we're recognizing them as an equal counterpart. Eventually, we took six months to study this, and we went back to the Soviets in May of 1971 and said, yeah, we agreed to talk.

And we had our first talks in October of 1971 in Moscow. It worked out really well for us because Nixon had announced that he was going to China and the Soviets were now balling all over themselves and invited Nixon to come to Moscow. So when you have a summit, you know, made in 1972, leaders like to have agreements to sign. So, you know, I remember talking to Herb Oken, who was the State Department's deputy, and he said, hey, baby, we got ourselves a deal here. It was just a matter of, you know, coming to a consensus. And quite frankly, the initial Soviet proposals were kind of like exactly what we were hoping for. So it was a very, you know, the only issue that the Soviets would insist on is they wanted to have come no closer. Let's set up like protective zones around our ships, maybe 100 yards.

You can't come any closer than 100 yards. to our warships and that was something we kind of wanted to avoid because there are opportunities where, for example, we wanted to do some intelligence collection where we

could safely come off alongside the Soviet warship and kind of scout them all over and take a close do some analysis so we pushed back on that and the Soviets also wanted to try to

called AS for submarines and that was a non-starter you know like proposing well you know if the submarines in our waters they have to uh you know ping every five minutes well you know the whole purpose of submarines is you know to say stay uh climbed into stunts so you know that but you know we kind of just looked at them and shook our heads and they understood you know that's you know because you know they're operating submarines also that's a big part of their uh quarter of battle so yeah so uh yeah the agreement was signed on may 25th 1972 uh warner uh signed on behalf of president nixon and admiral borshkov signed on behalf of the indian president yeah for the listeners before we continue on with any questions um if you haven't been to see 100

yards is very very close when you're out at sea uh 100 yards you and i standing on either end of a football field on land, it seems like quite a ways. I can't throw anything to you that far, but I'd see a hundred yards is you're basically right next to one another. And if you're on track for a collision at that point, you're going to collide. There's nothing that the two of you can do at that point. So just a little perspective. I was surprised to hear you say it was coming no closer than a hundred yards, but you mentioned him a couple of times now. Who was John Warner and what was his part in the development of the agreement? Yeah, John Warner, he's a really interesting guy.

I had the privilege of doing his oral history on behalf of the Naval Institute. So his background, he enlisted in the Navy at the end of World War II, but was still up at Great Lakes when the war ended. So he got out, went to Washington and Lee, Goes into the Marine Corps Reserve, serves, I guess, commission, serves in Korea, goes into the Marine Corps Reserve, and decides to go to law school at the University of Virginia. He gets involved in politics and works on the Nixon campaign as a kind of like a go-ahead guy, 1960. Of course, Nixon loses. Nixon runs for president again in 68.

Again, Warner is an up-and-coming lawyer. He had married Kathy Mellon of the Carnegie Mellon Bank. So he had some financial support. Ironically, the Mellons, I think, supported the Democratic Party. But in that position, because of the support for Nixon in 1968, he was hoping to be Secretary of the Navy. He's still a young guy. He gets picked to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. And he's kind of groomed to become Secretary of the Navy in May of 72.

So as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he gets tapped to head the delegation. And they hooked him up with Herbert Okun of the State Department, a very capable diplomat. And he proved to be a very competent negotiator on behalf of the United States. How did those negotiations with the Soviets unfold then? well as i kind of mentioned there was it went rather smoothly um uh there were some issues you know they they broke down it's like surface to surface talks and they were air to air talks and we had uh an interesting incident uh in 19 the air to air talks are having some problems so For some background, there was an incident in May of 1968 in the North Sea with the USS Essex aircraft carrier, where a Soviet Badger reconnaissance aircraft was flying so low, they had the Essex ceased flight operations to let this guy go past.

and you know i saw correspondence with the pilot of an s2 tracker that was about to take off and and he's just looking ahead wondering why things are delayed he just sees a tail with a red star flying up across the bow of the ship this plane is playing so low and as it continued out the The pilot decides to turn the aircraft, and it cartwheels into the North Sea. Well, you know, there's concern here. It's like the Soviets are going to think we shot down the aircraft. We send in a rescue party. You know, we're just able to recover the bodies.

You know, flash traffic to Washington, to Moscow. The Soviets send a destroyer. We recover remains of the pilot. And Edward Day is this ops boss on the Essex, who is on a motor whale boat, goes over to the Soviet destroyed with the remains. And, you know, it was a, so flash forward to 1972, Edward Day is now heading our air discussions. And he's talking to this guy, Petrovsky, who is a Soviet counterpart. And they're getting nowhere. So Davis decides to talk about, you know, the reason we need to have a safety at sea in aviation, and he tells a story about the Badger.

And Wachowski just looks at him and says, I understand the situation very clearly. The pilot you recovered, that was my son. So after that, you know, they made progress as far as, you know, with aircraft, as far as how aircraft were supposed to meet up. You're not supposed to fly over open bomb bays and fly in a hostile manner. The buzzings were supposed to stop, for example. So they made progress on the airspace. And hence you had an agreement, which was like all these different behaviors. you know you know don't point uh guns at each other don't point laser but eventually they say

don't point lasers abide by the rules of the road you know there was like a code of signals was uh developed you know to indicate i'm going to turn this way my intention is this i have a you know my engineering casualty it's uh so that the two sides can communicate you know typically by flag hoist did incidents continue to occur after the agreement signing incidents did continue to occur and uh but at a much reduced rate the big test really was uh you know the agreement occurred in 72 and a tandem to the agreement occurred in 73 the protocol applied to auxiliary ships which is significant and uh you had the 73 october war which you know you had uh i guess well over a hundred i think like 85 soviet warships uh some uh 60 american in the eastern mediterranean

and uh that could have gotten nasty you know under previous uh war you see you know ships pointing guns at each other you know that somebody could have you know pressed the trigger but everybody was pretty well behaved and there were very few incidents whatsoever in the october 73 warrants uh so it's good to have the agreement in hand occasionally you would have somebody would be a little aggressive on one side or the other and violate the rules there was occasional collision here and there, like a shouldering incident, but for the most part, there are only

like a half dozen or so incidents and both sides will report what happened and at these annual meetings, they would discuss it and you know, the one side would, you know, take take accept blame or

blame with us to be accepted. Would you advocate then for something similar with China? You know, I used to say we don't need something like that with China, because what happened with China is in 1998, we had something called the Military Maritime, I think it was a communications agreement. Basically, what it did is it set up an annual opportunity for the two sides to have discussions on maritime affairs. Simultaneously, we had something called the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, where countries from around the region get together to discuss maritime matters. They came up with something called CUSE.

CUSE is the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea. That's it. Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea. Thank you. So we had to, like, that was very much almost like based on ATP, the Allied Tactical Publication. So we had that type of mechanism in place. And I've talked to commanders of U.S. destroyers, and they've had, like, those communications with their Chinese counterparts. It works rather well.

So the, you know, my saying, you know, we kind of have the mechanisms in place through the MMCA and the cues with the Chinese that we had with D.C. But here's the problem. We had an agreement with the Chinese signed in 2014 between our Secretary of Defense and their Ministry of Defense, formalizing this into an agreement that we'll use the MMCA communications and the cues as a means to talk. The problem we have with the Chinese is that this was an agreement between the Defense Ministry and the Department of Defense. I attended a conference in Shanghai in 2010. The Chinese, they're very stoic by it. So during this conference, you know, there are agencies, well, yeah, that's an agreement between the Ministry of Defense. It doesn't apply to like the Coast Guard or doesn't apply to the Fisheries Patrol. In recent years, I think the Chinese have been kind of consolidating all these different agencies under like the border Coast Guard.

So my argument about maybe doing Inc.C. was an executive agreement between heads of state, and perhaps maybe you just sign an Inc.C. agreement between the two nations to up the level of, you know, public support, you know, and make basically the head of government, you know, make them accountable to their respective militaries on their behavior. now. So that's the only reason I've kind of come around on Incident Set C as a consideration for the People's Republic of China. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. David Winkler. David, where can we find you online and what else are you working on? Well, as I mentioned, I have a book on USS Langley that just came out, Navy's First Aircraft Carrier.

and I have a couple of books related to the USS Atlanta one I would say Neptune Superno is Boyd Mustard's diary that is out, The Mighty A, The History

of the Atlanta USS Atlanta itself is due out in September with Case Made and I'm working on a book actually it's James Holloway's memoir on his time on the destroyer

bin unit in World War II. Of course, he died five years ago, but I have the manuscript, so I've edited and worked with the Naval Institute to publish it later this year. I've been entitled to destroyers at war, so that's kind of keeping me busy.

Hopefully, maybe sometime in a future date, we'll talk about those books. Yeah, absolutely, and I forgot to mention earlier, I mean we did publish the earlier interview with you on the mustin diary c control 520 so the listeners you can go back and listen to that if you'd like i will get with you offline to get the the name of the norman palmar study on the soviet intelligence or soviet naval intelligence i was able to find the john warner usni oral history as

you and i were talking there so that'll be linked as well but we look forward to seeing all the other projects that you have going here and hopefully we can bring it back but uh thank you again for joining us. So listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. A porter, oh, and a porter, you know, where have they put it in the alley? A porter, wine, both white and red, oh, put it on the shimbo now. So help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley. Where have they put it in the alley? Help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley.

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