Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion Horror Book Review

  Blind Man’s Bluff meets The Hunt for Red October in the   shocking untold story of an American submarine torpedoed at the height of the Cold War—and the decades long cover-up that followed.

  One Navy admiral called it “one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of   our era.” To this day, the U.S. Navy officially describes it an   inexplicable accident. For decades, the real story of the disaster has   eluded journalists, historians, and the family members of the lost crew.  But a small handful of Navy and government officials knew the truth from   the very beginning: The sinking of the U.S.S. Scorpion and its crew   of 99 men on May 22, 1968, was an act of war.

  In this major work of historical reporting, Ed Offley reveals that the   sinking of the U.S.S. Scorpion has never been a mystery, but rather   a secret buried by the U.S. government in a frantic attempt to keep the Cold   War from turning into a hot war. The Soviets had torpedoed the Scorpion in   reprisal for the destruction of the Soviet missile sub K-129, which the Americans had sunk in the Pacific just ten weeks   earlier. But why does the U.S. Navy continue to hide the real story of what   happened on that fateful day in 1968?

  In Scorpion Down, military reporter Ed Offley tells the true story   of the U.S.S. Scorpion for the first time and dramatically recounts   a little-known episode that nearly brought about World War III. And he   conclusively demonstrates that the Navy’s official account of the Scorpion   incident—from the frantic open-ocean hunt for the wreckage to a court of   inquiry’s final conclusions—is nothing more than a carefully constructed   series of lies.