WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - The submarine Jimmy Carter, which joined the Navy's fleet on Saturday, has a special capability, intelligence experts say: it is able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.
The Navy does not acknowledge that the submarine has this capability. "That's going to be classified in nature," said Kevin Sykes, a Navy spokesman. "You're not going to get anybody to talk to you about that."
But intelligence community watchdogs have little doubt. The previous spy submarine, the Parche, was retired last fall. That would only happen if a new one was on the way, they say.
The $3.2 billion Carter was extensively modified from its basic design, given a hull extension that allows it to house technicians and gear to perform the cable-tapping and other secret missions, experts say. The Carter's hull, at 453 feet, is 100 feet longer than the other two submarines in the Seawolf class.
"The submarine is basically going to have as its major function intelligence gathering," said James Bamford, author of two books on the National Security Agency.
Continue reading the main storyThe submarine is the first named after a living former president. Mr. Carter, himself a submariner during his time in the Navy, was on hand for the ceremony on Saturday in Groton, Conn.
Navy public information touts some of the Carter's special abilities. In the extended hull section, the boat can provide berths for up to 50 Special Operations troops, like Navy SEALs. It has an "ocean interface" that serves as a sort of hangar bay for smaller vehicles and drones to launch and return. It has the usual complement of torpedo tubes and Tomahawk cruise missiles, and it will also serve as a platform for researching new technologies useful on submarines.
The Carter, like other submarines, will also have the ability to eavesdrop on communications -- what the military calls signals intelligence -- passed through the airwaves, experts say. But its ability to tap undersea fiber-optic cables may be unique in the fleet.
Communications worldwide are increasingly transmitted solely through fiber-optic lines, rather than through satellites and radios.
"The capacity of fiber optics is so much greater than other communications media or technologies, and it's also immune to the stick-up-an-antenna type of eavesdropping," said Jeffrey Richelson, an expert on intelligence technologies.
To listen to fiber-optic transmissions, intelligence operatives must physically place a tap somewhere along the route. If the stations that receive and transmit the communications along the lines are on foreign soil or otherwise inaccessible, tapping the line is the only way to eavesdrop on it.
The intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such as how the information recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security Agency for review.
In the 1970's, an American submarine placed a tap on an undersea cable along the Soviet Pacific coast, and submarines had to return every few months to pick up the tapes. The mission was ultimately betrayed by a spy, and the recording device is now at the KGB museum in Moscow.
If submarines still must return every so often to collect the communications, the taps will not provide speedy warnings, particularly against imminent terrorist attacks.
"It does continue to be something of a puzzle as to how they get this stuff back to home base," said John Pike, a military expert at GlobalSecurity.org.
After sea trials, the Carter will go to its home port in Bangor, Wash.
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