The Sound of the Enemy: How the US Navy’s Ocean Systems Technicians Tracked the Soviets

When Geoff Ugent was discharged from the U.S. Navy, he had to wait 27 years to talk about anything he did for the branch of the military. His former job title, ocean systems technician (OT), sounds more like he worked in oceanography or marine engineering than in one of the most select groups in naval intelligence.

“We were very rare,” Ugent said. “Most people in the military didn’t know what we were.”

In 1974, fresh out of high school, Ugent was considering joining the military. He met with all branches in the recruiter station. The Navy, stationed at the end of the hall, was the last to interview him. Ugent told the recruiter that he would consider joining if he could receive a guarantee that he would never be placed on a ship.

It was a rather oxymoronic request, being that scouring the oceans is what the Navy does, and in order to do that, they have to use ships. As much as it sounded like a poor joke, Ugent was in earnest. The reason he didn’t want to be on a ship was because several of his friends who had joined the Navy had told him that they were constantly on maintenance duty, keeping the ship clean.

The recruiter took Ugent at his word and said that of the approximately 70 jobs available in the Navy, he could offer him one that would help to ensure he wouldn’t be placed on a ship. He said that if Ugent could pass the intelligence test, then he could be considered for the position. So what was the position?

“He told me, ‘I don’t know much about it because it’s highly classified.’ He didn’t have much to share with me” about the position, Ugent said with a laugh.

“Imagine trying to sell that job. ‘I can’t tell you much about the job. You want it?’”

After passing the intelligence test and undergoing a thorough background check that cost the Navy $10,000 (approximately $55,000 today), he was off to boot camp, where he spent a brutal winter on the Great Lakes before being stationed at a secret submarine base in Key West, Florida, for his technical training, also known as A School.

“Only 1 percent of the active-duty Navy are allowed to be Navy SEALs at any one time, which is about 2,500 people in the world. There were 2,500 of those, but there were fewer than 1,000 of us,” he said, referring to the OT position.

While the Cold War raged on, as it would for nearly two more decades, the United States remained in a death struggle with the Soviet Union.

Ugent and the rest of the OTs were assigned the task of tracking and identifying Soviet seacraft. They were on constant alert, listening to whatever was lurking in the world’s oceans, from submarines and battleships to cruisers and shrimp boats.

“We used hydrophone arrays,” Ugent said. “We had them fanned out on the continental shelf. Each base had two arrays. A couple of bases had a third one. Sound coming from a particular direction will hit this hydrophone before this one so you can triangulate sonically what direction that’s coming from.

“When you have 80 hydrophones listening, you can be pretty precise on where something is coming from. But where is not enough information. It’s important, but what is it? We had the intel to be able to identify any type of ship—surface or subsurface—based on the noises it made.”

Toward the end of World War II, this proven theory was put to use in order to locate the position of downed sailors. The sailors would drop a small explosive device from their life raft and the sound of the explosion would be heard from listening stations and then triangulated in order to find the location of the life raft.

Over the years, the Navy used this scientific discovery to create more advanced technology called the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) in order to locate the position of Soviet diesel and nuclear submarines.

Ugent said the OTs were listening for very low-frequency sounds, around 500 hertz or lower. He said the ship would make various noises based on its machinery, and the sound frequencies would emanate from the ship’s hull.

“We reported to our direct officers on the base, then that report went to a hub—either on the West Coast or the East Coast,” he said. “The hub reported directly to the secretary of the Navy, and then the secretary of defense would get involved, and then they would report to the president and the vice president. Based on our information, they made decisions about what the rest of the Navy and about half the Air Force was going to do at any given moment.”

Toward the end of 1967, John Walker, a Navy chief warrant officer and submarine communications specialist, walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and agreed to become a spy. Eighteen years later, he would be credited with arguably the worst security breach of the Cold War.

According to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Walker’s spy ring provided the Soviets with “access to weapons and sensor data and naval tactics, terrorist threats, and surface, submarine, and airborne training, readiness, and tactics.”

Perhaps from Walker’s information or by other means of espionage, Ugent found himself at the center of a Soviet attempt to gather classified Navy technology.

“I can personally attest that that was an interesting day,” he said with a laugh.

When he was stationed at San Nicolas Island, he and his team tracked a surface vessel that had come out of a Soviet port in the northwest Pacific. They followed it as it went around the Aleutian Islands chain, down the coast of Alaska, Canada, and Washington state, and stopped near Santa Barbara, California, where it attempted to port. After the Santa Barbara Port Authority denied the Soviet ship access, the ship made its way farther south to San Nicolas Island.

The island has a 27-mile perimeter. The secret naval base takes up a very small portion of that coast. Oddly enough, the Soviet vessel stopped two miles away from the coast, directly in front of the base. Ugent noted that not only was it a violation to stop in front of the base, but the island also restricted ships from being closer than three miles.

“We were issued M16s and were lined up 10 feet apart down the beach,” he recalled. “A half dozen SEALs took off in a boat and met up with the Soviet landing craft about a mile out that was trying to come to shore. At the same time, two Navy F-16s came flying overhead.”

The Soviets in the small boat stated that their ship was a research vessel.

“I suppose they were a research vessel and they probably had a bunch of Soviet Marines onboard,” he said, laughing. “What were they coming for? They were coming to raid us and steal our intel. They were coming to kill us, because we weren’t about to give that up.”

When the Navy SEALs told the Soviets that the F-16s would soon sink their ship if they didn’t leave, the group turned their small boat around, boarded their ship, and left. Ugent said the ship definitely left. He and his team tracked it all the way back to Hawaii.

“What was interesting about that ship was what it was. It was actually a Soviet destroyer without the big guns,” he said. “They took the big guns off of it and painted everything that wasn’t glass white. It had no flags. No identifying markers. Nothing.

“China is the new big threat in the room because they have even grander thoughts about taking over stuff than the Soviets did,” he said.

“The Soviets wanted the Eastern bloc and all that. China wants everything. They aren’t like our country, where we think in blocks of two years or four years. They’re thinking a hundred years in advance. That’s a different threat than the Soviets.

“The dicey thing is the countries that won’t act properly, like Iran and North Korea. They’re the loose cannons, so to speak. The world is much more dangerous now than in the ‘70s when I served.”