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(ICBM). In such a tense climate, the Navy wanted the Gudgeon incident squashed and squashed fast.
"Bad Ass," the radio tech who had sent the message in English, was promoted to chief and transferred off the boat instantly. Word was, the sub force made him send messages from then on with his left hand, lest his style, his signature of sorts, tell anyone intercepting communications that a U.S. sub was around.
Bessac was off the boat as well. Slated for transfer before the holddown, from diesel boats to a billet in Admiral Rickover's nuclear Navy, his orders didn't change. What did change, however, was Gudgeon's operating schedule. The Navy hastily announced that she was going to become the first submarine of any nation to circumnavigate the globe. It was the best way to get her out of the Pacific, where she was now well known to the Soviets, and it was the best way to try to keep the story from spreading throughout the sub force.
Of course, the Navy offered other explanations for the trip. Deeming it designed to implement a "People to People" program, President Eisenhower personally designated each man on the boat "an Ambassador of good will to the world." Each of these ambassadors was ordered never to talk about the incident.
Meanwhile, energized by its victory, the Soviet Navy began roughing up other U.S. spy subs. Among them was the USS Wahoo (SS-565), which was caught near a Soviet beach early in 1958 but managed to escape even though one of her engines blew out. Perhaps because subs went about their work quietly, the Soviets showed more restraint than they did with spy planes, some of which deliberately lit up defense radars in order to measure those systems. As nasty as the underwater battles got, no subs were sunk, and the "depth charges" were usually no more powerful than the small explosives dropped on Gudgeon.
But submarine battles in Soviet territory were now firmly entrenched as part of the cold war, and tensions only intensified as both sides prepared to deploy their first missile subs. After the Soviets launched Sput nik in the fall of 1957, President Eisenhower quickly accelerated plans to build nuclear-powered subs that could fire Polaris ballistic missiles while hiding underwater. In the meantime, the Navy was refitting some diesel subs to carry Regulus guided missiles, descendants of the German buzz bombs with ranges of between 300 and 400 nautical miles. The Regulus subs would have to surface to launch, and the missiles would have to be guided by radar from launch to landing by both the sub and a second boat positioned closer to the Soviet coast, but they would still he a potent new threat to the Soviets.

The fear that the Soviets would answer by sending their own spy subs and missile boats close to U.S. waters prodded top officials in Washington to extend their grasp over this business of underwater spying. Suddenly, operations that Navy fleet commanders had become used to controlling were being reviewed by the White House and the Pentagon. The CIA and the National Security Agency-the codebreaking agency that was so super-secretive that even people who worked there joked that NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything"-also began to play a larger role in setting the priorities for what intelligence would be collected.
Hardly any of the Soviet diesel subs had made the long transit to U.S. shores yet, but that didn't stop an outbreak of "Red hysteria." One member of the House of Representatives proclaimed that nearly two hundred Soviet subs had been sighted off the Atlantic coast. Ordinary citizens began manning "submarine watchtowers," and over the next several years submarine "sightings" became more frequent. One woman identified in Navy documents only as Mrs. Gilkinson would report seeing three subs near a Florida beach, including one that she said came within ten feet of her while she was skin-diving. A man in Texas reported spotting a periscope in what turned out to he five feet of water.
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