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

Offley, Ed

ISBN 10: 1598870939 ISBN 13: 9781598870930

Publisher: HighBridge Audio, 2007

Synopsis

The Hunt for Red October meets Blind Man's Bluff in the untold story of an American submarine torpedoed at the height of the Cold War-and the forty-year cover-up that followed.

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 ninety-nine men died. On May 22, 1968, an American submarine was sunk by the Soviets as reprisal for the sinking of a Soviet sub just ten 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 forty 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 book to tell what really happened. It's 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.

About this title

From the Author:

Ed Offley has been a military reporting specialist for newspapers and online publications since 1981, including the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Virginia, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Stripes.com, and DefenseWatch magazine. He is currently Military Reporter for the News Herald in Panama City, Florida. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Offley served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He lives in Panama City Beach, Florida.

From the Back Cover:

The loss of the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion on Memorial Day, May 27, 1968, has been commemorated by an American admiral as "one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era." After the sub failed to return to port following a routine three-month Mediterranean deployment, a frantic search ensued. Nine days later the Navy announced that the submarine and the ninety-nine crewmen on board were presumed lost.

In this stunning work of investigative journalism, Ed Offley reveals that the U.S. Navy knew from the very beginning that the Scorpion had been sunk by the Soviets. He tells the dramatic story of a secret battle that could have brought about World War III, and he conclusively demonstrates that the Navy's official story about the Scorpion incident—from the frantic open-ocean hunt for the wreckage to a Court of Inquiry's final conclusions—is nothing more than a carefully-constructed series of lies.

About this edition

• Publisher: HighBridge Audio
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1598870939
• ISBN 13: 9781598870930
• Binding: Audio CD