Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.

Little by little the whole story behind the things that happened during the Cold War will come out....and it will be shocking!

This book is a great crack at the door of knowledge of some of those stories, a great read.

I found the book fascinating and probably the most interesting book I've read in a long time...maybe ever.

It's about the K-129 russian sub that is widely known as the sub the CIA attempted to raise from the ocean floor. I've seen previous documentaries on it and they always stated that only a protion of the sub was recovered. I found that hard to believe that after building a ship and assembling a crew that they would simply give up after one attempt when a protion of the sub broke off during recovery. According to the book this is a CIA cover story. The author states that almost all of the sub was recovered. Why did they go to all this trouble to recover an older diesel sub? It was for political blackmail states the author, and he lays down a pretty convincing case. The real mission of the sub was and is too sensitive to acknowledge.
The book states that the sub was taken over by KBG agents (11-15 crew members were added at the last minute) directed by hard liners in Moscow to mimick a chinese nuclear attack on Pearl Harbor to start a Chinese-American war. He makes a good case for this,...when the sub was about 350 miles from Pearl to simulate a less capable Chinese sub, when they could have launch from 700-800 miles away. Another part of this was they also surfaced to launch when they didn't have to.
To reveal that a superpower lost control over it's nuclear arsenal is alot more damning than any code book or other military hardware onboard. That was why Nixon went to all that trouble to recover K-129, and why the govt still keeps many secrets on this. The book's message is still revelant today as was during the cold war since many or most of the former USSR's nuclear weapons are still around, and probably under less control today than was back then.

For those of you who now dismiss the Cold War as just international rivalry at its most intense, this factual and very well written account of what almost happened to us via a rogue Russian missile-launching submarine and the resulting coverups (including the buiding and use of Hughes "Glomar Explorer") should be required reading. It wasn't the Cuban Missile crisis that almost started World War III...it was this, an attempt gone wrong to fire a Russian nuclear missile against the west coast of the US. A stark and frightening cautionary tale, indeed!

A few months back I had lunch with an old friend and the conversation turned to the Cuban Missile Crisis. "That was the biggest event of the Cold War, don't you think?" my friend commented. I concurred. Then I read this outstanding and revelatory work of narrative history. RED STAR ROGUE makes a persuasive claim that the biggest -- yet heretofore unknown to the general public -- event of the Cold War was in fact this: In 1968 the Soviet submarine K-129 went rogue and sank while attempting to launch a nuke at Pearl Harbor. Sound preposterous? It won't after you read this. Sewell, a veteran of the USS Parche, and Richmond, an experienced and respected journalist, have made a compelling case for the above based on political and economic factors of the time, but also very specific nuclear, structural, engineering, and military personnel-related details garnered from a trove of only recently released US Naval documents and Soviet archives, and from extensive interviews with intelligence sources in both the US and Russia. The book is well sourced in the back and the adventurous reader can follow-up with the details on his or her own. Those of you compelled by this will also want to read Sewell's follow-up book, ALL HANDS DOWN.

Sharply divergent opinions on this book. I do not generally subscribe to conspiracy theories but I'm willing to make an exception for this one. Red Star Rogue makes a convincing case that, March 7, 1968, an attempt was made to attack Pearl Harbor. Were this to be so, much of the front page news that we remember was fiction. Lots of questions get answered in surprizing ways. This is plausable.