Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon; The Untold Story Of the USS Scorpion

New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Glued binding. Paper over boards. xiv, 482 p. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. From an on-line posting: "Ed Offley has been a military reporting specialist for 25 years. The author has written about aspects of the Scorpion story for leading military journals and is the acknowledged expert on the topic. Offley has covered military operations and exercises in 18 countries. He served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam and lives in Panama City Beach, Florida." From Wikipedia: "USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy and the sixth vessel of the US Navy to carry that name. Scorpion was lost on 22 May 1968, with 99 crewmen lost. The USS Scorpion is one of two nuclear submarines the US Navy has lost, the other being USS Thresher. It was one of four mysterious submarine disappearances in 1968; including the Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve (S647) and the Soviet submarine K-129." The last thing they heard was the faint scree-scree of a high-speed propeller. Then the torpedo hit, the warhead detonated, the ocean thundered in, and 99 men died. On May 22, 1968, an American submarine was sunk by the Soviets as reprisal for the sinking of a Soviet sub just 10 weeks before. The tragic loss of the USS Scorpion and its crew is still described by the U.S. Navy as an "inexplicable accident." In fact, it was a secret buried by both the U.S. and the Soviet governments to prevent the Cold War from turning into World War III. For nearly 40 years, researchers, journalists, and family members of the lost crew have tried to learn the truth while the Navy and U.S. intelligence communities have covered up the facts. Based on a quarter-century of research, an extraordinary array of new resources, and hundreds of interviews with military personnel with direct connections to the disaster, Scorpion Down is the first to reveal that the official Scorpion story-the sub s failure to make port, the frantic open-ocean hunt, the search that ultimately "found" the wreckage, and the Court of Inquiry's carefully crafted conclusions-was all a lie.