Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation, dated 29 January 1992, reproduces an IZVESTIYA article by Marat Zubko about Soviet submarine U-137, which ran aground near the Karlskrona naval base in Sweden on 27 October 1981. It reports former commander Anatoliy Gushchin's claims that the submarine carried nuclear weapons and that he had orders to blow it up. It also quotes Swedish commander Karl Andersson likening claims of submarine incursions to flying saucers. Captain 1st Rank Vladimir Vazhov disputes the order claim and describes two Soviet minisubmarines.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1992 Document 3 of 12 commander of the naval base at Karlskrona were reflections of his popularity. 19. But then "'national hero'" Karl Andersson literally flabbergasted the public. He declared that all of the racket raised over the last 10 years about invasions of Swedish skerries by foreign submarines was simply fantasy, like with flying saucers. The case of the U-137 is of course an exception. 20. 'We have not a single shred of evidence of such violations,' he noted, 'not a single photograph of a foreign submarine. Over 1,200 submarines were sunk during World War II, but in an entire decade of searching we were unable to find even a tiny rivet from a violating vessel. All that the experts have is a photograph of impressions made on the bottom of Khorsh [transliteration] Fjord, but they could have been left by the anchor of some ship.' 21. After this statement Swedish television organized a debate between Karl Andersson and Swedish Defense Minister Anders Bjork. The latter asserted that because he had departed from active service, the commander was unacquainted with the latest Coast Guard reports. And the other stated an opinion that should be especially interesting to our readers: 22. ''When they changed the buttons on the uniform of Soviet soldiers in Kazakhstan, for example, we knew about it in a couple of months. But although minisubmarines have been operating for so many years, we still don't know where they are made, who makes them or where they come from.' 23. The minister parried: We know where they come from, but I can't divulge this fact at the moment. So who's right? We will probably find out only after the archives of the former union ministry of defense are made public. The appropriate documents are stored there, if they exist. 24. If our submariners had in fact been involved in violations, sooner or later this will have to be admitted to us. And if they hadn't been, all the better: We don't need the bad publicity. What is especially important is to know everything about how matters stood then, and stand now, with regard to orders to blow up submarines together with their crews and nuclear torpedoes. ## 25. Vazhov on Gushchin's Statement, by V. Litovkin 26. The editor's office asked Captain 1st Rank Vladimir Vazhov, chief of the Northwestern Sector of the Main Naval Staff Operations Directorate, to comment on the statement by Anatoliy Gushchin, former
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.