Operation Ivy Bells

<p> A super-secret off-the-books spy organization; a security-clearance starting at Top Secret and going up from there; an attack by giant squid during a thousand-foot dive while breathing an exotic gas; a cat's whisker escape from death during a three-day decompression-and that's just the first two chapters of <em>Operation Ivy Bells</em> before the action really gets underway.</p><p> </p><p>In a fast-paced personal narrative J.R. Mac MacDowell details a breathtaking series of events during a super-secret intelligence gathering operation at the height of the Cold War. Riding the nuclear submarine <em>Halibut</em> Mac and his saturation diving team surreptitiously enter Soviet-controlled Sea of Okhotsk on a proof-of-concept mission. They install a tap on an underwater communications cable at 400 feet and narrowly escape death when a storm snaps <em>Halibut's </em>anchor cables. They retrieve missile parts from a Soviet missile-test splash-zone getting caught in a sonar-web set by the crafty skipper of an old Soviet diesel submarine. Mac's divers temporarily disable the sub and <em>Halibut</em> escapes to Guam dogged by the sub Skipper.</p><p> </p><p> Having proved the concept they return in a <em>Halibut</em> outfitted with skids so she can sit on the bottom to attach a 12-thousand-pound pod to the cable for future retrieval. In the missile splash-zone they lock in deadly underwater combat with Soviet divers. With the free world at stake they capture one and kill the rest.</p><p> </p><p> <em>Halibut's</em> submariners and saturation divers finally return home without ever publicly revealing their crucial contribution to winning the Cold War receiving an unpublicized Presidential Unit Citation.</p>