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

Foreword Shortly after the opening of trade relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1980s, I was assigned to work with Chinese engineers at the Beijing research facility of the Ministry of Aeronautics Industry. It was, for me, the first of many memorable trips to this once-secluded country. It was likewise memorable for my Chinese hosts, because I was the first American they had ever met. The scientists and engineers I worked with were well educated in the basic technical skills of their fields. But they were completely ignorant of what the world was like outside China. The leadership had only recently permitted peasant farmers to sell their excess produce in the cities, though many Chinese had not yet learned to cook since leaving their communes. This was years before the Tiananmen Square massacre, and everywhere there was a feeling of optimistic uncertainty. Like most visitors to China in those days, I had been assigned a "government watcher." One day as we ate lunch, he was called away, leaving me alone with a group of engineers I had come to know fairly well. They were nervously glancing around to see if anyone was watching. A man was placed at the entrance, obviously as a lookout. With a great show of courtesy and some embarrassment, the young engineer who spoke the best English began by asking me, "Mr. Sewell, may we inquire about an incident that we heard of some time ago?" The question took me by surprise, and I must admit to feeling a twinge of fear. It had been only a few years since I had served on the crew of an American submarine under the command of a highly classified organization. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I did have information that could compromise intelligence operations critical to American security, and I had no idea how much these people knew about my past. "Here it comes," I told myself, preparing for the third degree. So I was stunned when my chief inquisitor timidly asked his question. "We have heard rumors for some time now, that American spacemen have landed on the moon," the young engineer whispered, with a grave look on his face. "Is this correct?" He quickly produced a Western trade magazine and pointed to an article. Over half the magazine had been censored, blacked out; but in one obscure paragraph was a reference to the American Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and 1970s. I stood dumbfounded for several seconds. These highly trained engineers, the finest of Red China's aeronautical specialists, were surely joshing me. But they all leaned closer to hear my answer. They were not kidding. During the remainder of our lunch break, the Chinese engineers pressed me for the details of the U.S. astronauts' seven moon landings. When the commissar -- my minder -- returned, the enlightenment abruptly ended. Mao had warned his comrades, "When you open windows, you let in the flies." In this case, I was proud to be one of the first flies. The Chinese government was so repressive, their society so closed and secretive, that information about one of the greatest engineering and scientific accomplishments in human history had been withheld from the country's best technical minds. Years later, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, this memory came back to me.What haven't we been told? No one knows better than an American submariner the need to protect our military and technological secrets for the security of our nation. But archiving old secrets long after the crisis has passed deprives us of knowledge that free people need to make enlightened choices. Burying our history beneath layers of cover stories, security classifications, and deliberate deceit for the purpose of protecting mistakes or reputations of bygone leaders is a violation of a free people's rights. In the military, the highest restriction placed on a document is called a "need to know" classification. BuSewell, Kenneth is the author of 'Red Star Rogue The Untold Story of a Soviet Sumbarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.s.', published 2006 under ISBN 9781416527336 and ISBN 1416527338.