Visit & Search

In North American defense terms, the most sensitive area of ocean on the globe is the stretch of the North Atlantic between Newfoundland and the Scotch coast. Over this area would fly any Russian bombers trying to end-run U.S.Canadian continental defenses; through these waters would likely come Russian submarines slipping out through the Norwegian Sea bound for attacks on Atlantic shipping or coastal cities. For more than a year, the U.S. Navy's around-the-clock fleets of radar patrol planes and radar picket ships have been keenly aware of Russia's fleet of radar-equipped fishing trawlers cruising constantly in the richly stocked Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Last week, in a fast-moving action made notable by first-rate teamwork between White House, State Department and Pentagon, the U.S. Navy performed a historic peacetime action by intercepting and boarding one of the trawlers.*

The provocation was the interruption of five of twelve U.S.-owned transatlantic cables--four owned by Western Union, the fifth by American Telephone and Telegraph Co.--in the short period of five days. All the interruptions, or cuts, occurred in about the same spot, in the icy seas some 195 miles northeast of St. John's, Newfoundland. Around that spot, Navy patrols reported, only one ship was operating: the Russian fishing trawler Novorossisk.

Old Convention. Hours after the fourth cable break, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke called in half a dozen members of his staff and laid out the story. That morning, A.T. & T. had sent a plane over the trouble spot, dropped a note on the Novorossisk's deck: YOU HAVE CUT THE CABLE FOUR TIMES: STOP FISHING HERE AND GO SOUTH. The trawler moved a few miles. Burke's Judge Advocate General, Rear Admiral Chester Ward, then made a precedent-setting proposal: Send a Navy party aboard the Russian ship. Lawyer Ward cited an international covenant, signed by Czarist Russia and specifically recognized by the Communists since 1926. The Convention for the Protection of Submarine Cables of 1884, he said, authorizes naval ships to examine official documents of other vessels suspected of damaging and interfering with cables under the high seas.

Burke accepted the idea, got news of the fifth cable break, and checked out his plan with Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, who notified the White House. Minutes later, the order went from Burke to Norfolk, headquarters of Admiral Jerauld Wright's Atlantic Fleet. Norfolk messaged the U.S. Naval Base at Argentia, Newfoundland, which in turn radioed Lieut. Commander Ernest Korte, skipper of a converted destroyer escort, the radar picket ship U.S.S. Roy 0. Hale, outward bound on a routine month-long sea patrol. Hale immediately turned and steamed to the point where a twin-engined Navy P2V Neptune had located the Russian ship: 49DEG3O min. north, 49DEG20 min. west. Sixteen hours after Admiral Burke set the operation in motion, Hale had sighted Novorossisk, raised signal flags: HEAVE

TO: WE SENDING BOAT.

Photographic Commissar. Under command of Lieut. Donald Sheely, 34, the Minnesota-born, Annapolis-trained executive officer, Hale's motor whaleboat approached the trawler's starboard quarter, was waved to the portside where a ladder was lowered. Lieut. Sheely led his unarmed, three-man boarding party on deck without opposition. Aboard Novorossisk he found 48 men and six women, most of them wearing quilted, heavy-duty fishing garb, all obviously hard-working fishermen--all, that is, except for one commissar type in horn-rimmed glasses and brass-buttoned uniform, who photographed the boarding with an expensive camera.

The boarding party also found installed among the fishing gear a large assortment of radio equipment that seemed more than enough for modern fishing purposes, and an extra-long (3,000 ft.) sounding line. Since the Russian captain knew only a smattering of English, Lieut. Sheely put in a call for Radioman Roland Poulin, 19, Massachusetts-born son of French Canadians. Poulin was hustled over from Hale, soon found a Russian who could speak French. Still, Poulin had trouble making the Russians understand that the U.S. Government was gravely concerned over the cable breaks.

At length, the Russians ("neither overly friendly nor hostile--just resigned") permitted Sheely to examine the ship's papers (all in order) and the ship's log. From log notations, Sheely found that Novorossisk had indeed been plowing the seas near the cables at the time of the interruptions. Experts' consensus: the trawler's heavily weighted nets had fouled in the cables; when the fishermen raised the nets, they raised the cables too, and the cables were broken or cut away to save the trawling gear.*After a 70-min. tour of the ship, Sheely asked the captain to move his fishing operation farther south, headed back to Hale. Reported Skipper Korte in Washington: "There were no indications of intentions other than fishing."

To forestall the expected cries from the Kremlin, the State Department at week's end sent a note to Moscow explaining the Navy's action, but not apologizing for it. As far as the U.S. was concerned, the incident was closed, but the Russians were on notice that the U.S. was keeping close watch on the Soviets' radar-packed trawlers and their omnipresent, camera-toting commissars.

*"Visit and search," a peacetime euphemism for boarding alien vessels, is an old, embattled subject in international law. Britain boarded U.S. ships before the War of 1812, and the U.S. boarded vessels at various times thereafter: during the Civil War, in Prohibition days. In the South Atlantic a few months before Pearl Harbor, a party from the U.S. cruiser Omaha boarded and interned the German merchant raider Odenwald, which was masquerading under U.S. colors. The U.S. made a tentative stab at visit and search in 1954, when it asked Britain and other allies to permit U.S. Navy ships to seize any arms shipments bound for revolution-torn Guatemala. Britain's cold reply: "There is no general power of search on the high seas in peacetime." *Cable companies have had similar trouble with fishing trawlers for years. In cable legend, a Chinese fisherman is supposed to have once mistaken a heavy, metal-sheathed cable for gold; triumphantly, he hauled in yard after yard as his little junk slowly sank to the bottom.

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