Chapter 6 - The Investigator
The NCIS investigation took eleven weeks.
It was led by Special Agent Diane Reyes. It was assisted by three other NCIS agents, two Navy judge advocates, one assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, and a forensic accountant who had been brought in to trace the funds that had been used to keep the USS Anzio off the books for sixteen years.
It uncovered the following.
The PELAGIC program had been established in 1998. It had been designed to test new submarine detection technology on a platform that could be operated without the knowledge of the Soviet Union, then Russia, then China. It had been funded through a classified budget line that was hidden inside a larger appropriations item. It had operated for eleven years. It had been terminated in 2009 after a change in administration and a change in priorities.
The USS Anzio had been the program's only ship.
She had been taken from the scrapyard at Brownsville and towed to a classified facility in the Gulf of Mexico. She had been rebuilt. She had been re-registered under a false name — "MV Pelagic Research Vessel" — and given a civilian hull number. She had been crewed by a mix of Navy sailors and civilian contractors. She had been operated out of San Diego under a cover story that described her as a "research platform" owned by a shell company in Delaware.
The night she sank — October 14, 2003 — she had been operating about two hundred miles southwest of San Diego. She had been conducting a classified mission. The mission had been to place a sonar array in a position where it could monitor the movements of foreign submarines operating in the Pacific.
The mission had gone wrong because a captain whose name was still classified had ordered the ship to a position that was outside her authorized operating area. The captain had believed — mistakenly, or recklessly, or both — that the ship could place her sonar array closer to a foreign submarine lane without being detected. The ship had been detected. There had been a confrontation. There had been a torpedo.
The ship had sunk.
The captain had been rescued.
The captain had been reassigned. The captain had been promoted. The captain had retired at the rank of rear admiral in 2014. The captain lives today in Florida. He has been subpoenaed. He has been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. His testimony is classified. His name is classified. His role in the sinking is classified. But his testimony has been presented to the court-martial in a closed session, and the court-martial has found that his conduct on the night of October 14, 2003 constituted "gross negligence" and "dereliction of duty" and "conduct unbecoming an officer."
He is not being charged. He is too old. He is too sick. He is protected by a plea agreement that the Justice Department negotiated in exchange for his cooperation.
Lieutenant Commander Peter Vale — who had been a young lieutenant aboard the ship on that night, who had been the officer of the deck, who had signed the deck log — had been ordered by the captain, in the hours after the sinking, to destroy the log. He had destroyed it. He had written a new log that omitted the unauthorized position change and the confrontation and the torpedo. He had signed the new log. He had submitted it to the classified program office. And he had been promoted twice since then — once to lieutenant commander, once to commander — because the men who ran the program had needed him to keep his mouth shut.
He had kept his mouth shut for sixteen years.
He had kept his mouth shut when the Navy told the families that their sons had died in a storm. He had kept his mouth shut when a young woman named Morgan Hale had joined the Navy and asked questions about her father's ship. He had kept his mouth shut when PELAGIC had been terminated and when the ship had been left at the bottom of the Pacific. He had kept his mouth shut when a salvage detachment had been tasked to dive on the wreck — the wreck that was being called a fishing trawler — and when the wreck had begun to give up her secrets.
He had been assigned to command the salvage detachment in 2020. He had been assigned there because the men who ran PELAGIC had needed someone who understood what was at the bottom of the ocean. He had been assigned there because he was the man who could keep the secret.
He had kept the secret.
Until a chief petty officer opened her dive bag on the wet steel deck of the salvage dock and pulled out a small brass nameplate with her father's initials on it.
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The investigation found that the USS Anzio was not the only wreck the detachment had been lying about. There were three other wrecks off Point Loma that had been misidentified. Two of them were U.S. Navy vessels — a submarine chaser and a mine sweeper — that had been used in classified programs during the Cold War and that had been sunk, deliberately and without documentation, in the 1970s and 1980s. One of them was a foreign vessel — a Soviet trawler — that had been captured in 1985 and scuttled in 1986 after its crew had been repatriated.
The investigation found that the salvage detachment had been diving on all four wrecks for twenty years. It found that the detachment had been filing recovery reports that described the wrecks as civilian vessels. It found that the detachment had been funded through a classified budget line that was hidden inside the Navy's shipwreck recovery program.
It found that the program was called "PELAGIC."
It found that the program had been terminated in 2009 but that the salvage detachment had continued to operate under its cover for another twelve years.
It found that the senior salvage officer — Commander Peter Vale — had been personally responsible for the continuation of the cover.
It found that he had been assisted by a lieutenant commander on the staff of Naval Surface Forces, Pacific — a man named Lieutenant Commander Harold Reese — who had signed the tasking orders. It found that Reese had been assisted by a captain — a man named Captain Gerald Voss — who had signed the funding requests.
Both Reese and Voss were charged. Both were tried. Both were convicted. Both are serving sentences in federal prison.
Commander Peter Vale was charged with obstruction of justice, falsification of official records, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and nine counts of manslaughter. He was tried in a general court-martial at Naval Base San Diego. He was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to fourteen years in federal prison. He was dismissed from the Navy. He was required to forfeit all pay and allowances. He was ordered to pay restitution to the families of the six sailors who had died aboard the USS Anzio in the amount of nine hundred thousand dollars.
He is currently serving his sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He will be eligible for parole in 2035.
He has never apologized.
He has never spoken to the families of the men who died aboard the USS Anzio.
He has never spoken to Morgan Hale.
She has not asked him to.
She does not need him to.
She has the truth.
That is enough.
May you like
That is more than enough.
That is everything.
