Whiskey on the Rocks

[mastodon]

Soviet Submarine Aground in 1981 Was Lost

Reuters - A Soviet submarine that ran aground off neutral Sweden two decades ago was lost and did not intentionally violate Swedish territorial waters, according to a report submitted to the Swedish government on Thursday.

The much-publicised "Whiskey on the Rocks" incident off Sweden's southeastern Baltic coast in autumn 1981 soured relations between Stockholm and Moscow for over 10 years and can still raise waves of acrimonious debate in domestic politics.

It set off a submarine surveillance frenzy in militarily non-aligned Sweden. More than 6,000 alleged sightings were reported to the authorities during the 1980s and early 1990s.

The massive hunt for the submarines, which embarrassed the Swedish military by failing to find anything, was one of the biggest military operations in Western Europe since 1945.

The fresh report commissioned by the government of Prime Minister Goran Persson, who commentators say is eager to get the issue out of the way before a September 2002 election, said there were fewer than 10 verified violations of Swedish waters.

It released hitherto unpublished information suggesting that the Soviet Whiskey-class U-137, which ran aground on October 27, 1981, had lost its way, just as Moscow claimed all along.

"The investigation has learned that the Soviet side was searching for the submarine for six hours in its assigned patrol area east of Bornholm before realising that it was in Swedish territory," it said.

"This has been known to the Swedish defence command ever since the incident," the report added, noting that earlier reports on the submarine affair had nevertheless concluded that the violation of Swedish territory must have been intentional.

Bornholm is a Danish island in the Baltic Sea off Sweden's south-eastern tip, about 120 km (75 miles) from Sweden's Karlskrona naval base, near which the submarine ran aground.

The report said it had not been possible to unearth solid evidence about the nationality of other submarines that probably entered Swedish waters during the 20-year period reviewed.

Despite the lack of hard facts, earlier reports pinned the territorial water violations squarely on the Soviet navy.

In March 2000 former U.S. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger said NATO submarines had operated in Swedish waters in the 1980s under a tacit agreement with Stockholm.

Allegations that submarines from NATO rather than the Soviet Union had been sighted have surfaced from time to time, most recently on Swedish TV4 television news on Wednesday evening.

"There was an explicit American strategy to carry out these kind of violations in waters of other countries to make people realise how serious the Russian threat was," Swedish foreign ministry official Ulf Svensson told TV4, citing a soon-to-be-published book.

[Wendist]

Hello Mastodon

I just could not leave this one alone could I?

For many years I was convinced the Whisky incident was all about a spying mission gone wrong. The odds for a lost soviet sub to end up on an island in a archipilago, having passed both a light-house and a couple of other islands at very close range seemed a bit high. Add to that the fact that the entire area was a military exclusion zone and that Swedens second most important naval base was just a few miles away and no one would belive it was an accident.

I am still rather sceptical but I have to admit that the new information is rather puzzling.

Regardles of why the sub ended up on that island it was tremendously negative PR for the SU and there were no way for them to prove their innocence, for years to come whenever the swedish navy dropped a couple of depth-charges on a shoal of fish or something( and that happened often enough ) western media would report that " now the ugly commies are at it again, spying on innocent neighbours".

I do not think that this incident matters much to Russia today but here in Sweden the new information is already causing political unrest and the usual questions are being asked, who knew what and at what time did they know.

By the way it was not only the soviet navy`s image that suffered from this incident. It took 13 HOURS before the stranded sub was discovered and then it was a civilian fisherman who reported it to the swedish navy. Some clowns

Regards Thomas