Navy officials and high‐ranking former members of the Defense Department acknowledged in interviews that the collision, as cited by crew members of the Gato, did occur. Through an aide, he refused to discuss any aspect of the 1969 patrol because of its classified nature. Lawrence Burkhardt 3d, the Gato's commanding officer at the time of the collision, is now serving at the Pentagon with the Navy's Bureau of Personnel. In addition, the crew members said, the Gato commander was told to prepare six accurate reports describing the collision and the events immediately after the collision, and to handdeliver those to a unit of the Atlantic Fleet command after returning to the East Coast.Ĭapt. The former crew members of the Gato said that a few days after the collision, their commanding officer was ordered by the Navy's Atlantic Fleet command in Norfolk, Va., to prepare 25 copies of a top‐secret after‐action report alleging that the submarine had broken off her patrols two days before the date of the collision because of a propeller shaft malfunction. The intelligencegathering operation was initiated in the early nineteen‐sixties. The Holystone operation, which more recently has carried the code names Pinnacle and Bollard, involves the use of specially equipped electronic submarines to spy inside the waters of the Soviet Union and other nations. ![]() During the patrol, they added, the Gato had been as close as one mile off the Soviet coast. Gato, was on a highly classified reconnaissance mission as part of what the Navy called the Holystone program when she and the Soviet submarine collided 15 to 25 miles off the entrance to the White Sea, in the Barents Sea off northern Russia, the crew members said. WASHINGTON, July 5-The commander of a Navy submarine on an intelligence patrol inside Soviet waters was ordered to file a Series of falsified reports in late 1969 after a collision at sea with a Soviet submarine, according to former crew members.
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