The Muskoe incident
A ndrew Brown A
RkStockholm aped by two Russian subs — Sobbing h Admiral tells all, lashes intrusive hack --- Shocked nation asks: How could cY get away?' Over the weekend the story i.ecned as if it would be written along those ,I.,nes. Rut on Tuesday morning it still seemed tn-rY. likely that there was at least one sub- , a.One still trapped outside the naval base irk on and inside the island of Muskoe in s,e southern archipelago outside inekhoim. st The southern part of the archipelago that Nretches from Stockholm down to Yllaeshamn, where another channel leads in to Soedertaelje, is best imagined as. a strings of concentric shallow arcs, with separated of islands, shoals and skernes 1.1 Parated from each other by broader chan- nnels cunning roughly from south-west to rh'rth-east. Horsfjaerden is one of the.inner- a,,°st channels, between the mainland ch'd.the island of Muskoe with its associated 6ain of islets and shoals. Outside Muskoe is's the border channel of Mysingen which a cat off from the open sea to the east by htlother chain of islands. Submarines have Mysingen detected both in Horsfjaerden and H during the last 11 days' search. and orsfjaerden is roughly ten miles long, wit, about three miles wide at its broadest, wh.”, an extremely irregular bottom of len the deepest point, about 150 feet
down, is a hole close to the passages out in- to Mysingen beyond the north-western end of Muskoe. These passages are now partial- ly blocked by nets arranged in at least three lines, to which mines have been attached, and guarded by an impressive array of sur- face ships and submarines. This is known as the 'northern trap'. The southern trap is a similar, but less heavily manned, arrange- ment around the shallower channel at the south-western tip of Muskoe.
The much larger channel of Mysingen outside these traps is in its turn mined and guarded where it joins the sea. These mines are always there — the minefields around Landsort where a Russian submarine was hunted at the end of August are a part of this system. But they are controlled from bunkers on land, to which magnetic detec- tors on the seabed are also wired. If these bunkers are manned, as they have been dur- ing the last week, and if one of the detectors indicates that a metal object is passing it, then the soldiers in the bunker can press the button if they see no ship. The resulting ex- plosion of nearly half a ton of high explosive is impressive, but it is not designed to sink the 'possible submarine', only to shake it up and, if possible, cripple it. South-west of Landsort, on the edge of the international waters, a Russian submarine has taken up position.
These fixed defences — both the traps
and the minefields — determine the rules of the hunt. The bangs are very impressive, but all they bring to the surface are quan- tities of dead fish. The Navy has admitted that it has dropped quite a lot of expensive high explosive on refrigerators and similar junk, with which the bottom of Horsfjaerd is apparently littered. Two of the depth- charges failed to explode at all, because the launching crew forgot to arm them. This may have been a good thing, since every depth-charge dropped creates enough con- fusion in the water for the submarine to shift position unheard.
The waters of the Baltic archipelagoes are a sonar operator's nightmare at the best of times. Currents of fresh, salt, and brackish water mingle unpredictably in a constantly changing pattern — one finds pike here that live off herring and cod — and all these dif- ferent sorts of water differ also in density and in their acoustic properties. The right depth for a hydrophone can vary several times a day, and can only be found each time by trial and error.
It was a fairly open secret that the only way to obtain accurate and up to date infor- mation about the progress of the search was to listen in to the paval signals traffic. This was especially fruitful because troops from so many different units and services were involved that even the simplest codes could only be used for routine messages. Anything urgent seems to have come in clear, and it is of course the urgent messages that are news. It is not illegal to listen in to military signals in this way in Sweden, though it is illegal to make use of the infor- mation so acquired. Nobody is pushing this point. The real stumbling block was money. The necessary equipment is expensive; at least three frequencies are involved; and something interesting can start at any hour of the day or night. So while almost all the journalists who thought of this did try it few papers succeeded; but those that did were often better informed than the Navy's press spokesmen, who were deliberately kept in ignorance by their superiors.
Because of this, the press conferences came to resemble the submarine hunt out- side. Most of the listeners were passive, waiting for the `dopplershift' that would enable them to reclassify 'possible truth' as `probable truth' or even 'truth'. Some sent out little pulses of their own — 'Why is the area outside the traps more interesting now?' — and studied the echoes — can only say that the area outside the traps is more interesting now.' Occasionally a depth- charge would be dropped in frustration on some unusually conspicuous piece of rub- bish — 'Can you comment on reports that Swedish diplomats are negotiating in Switzerland with representatives of a Foreign Power ?' But for all these efforts the possible truth remained as evasive as the possible submarine.
What seems to have happened is that the submarine first spotted in Horsfjaerd was a `baby': a specially developed spying vessel with a crew of only three or four, equipped with deception devices rather than weapons. Since a full-sized submarine was definitely spotted trying to break into Horsfjaerd from Mysingen through the northern trap on Thursday night, it seems a reasonable guess that this was the 'mother' coming to the 'baby's' rescue. The mine ex- plosions at the southern end of Mysingen
on Friday would then represent the hapP! couple's escape. This 'possible truth .1! plausible but the Navy didn't behave 01; the commanders of the operation believe that it were more than a 'possible truth': la fact they have every reason to hope that 11,1,5 an 'impossible truth' about an impossl' submarine.
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