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In truth, for all his eccentric ways, Balcomb was a social creature. He liked attending conferences and talking to scientists. He also liked having contact with the Navy. There'd been moments over the years when he'd considered asking the Navy to take him back. He thought he could help them, thought he could be part of the LFA inquiry from the inside. Yet in recent months, the Navy had also rebuffed him.
Until this day. Here was Joe Johnson saying he wanted to "address your concerns." Johnson wanted to hear Balcomb's story and explain the Navy's. He wanted to show Balcomb that those promoting LFA sonar weren't demons.
So what if Johnson's true aim was to defuse a voluble critic? Balcomb didn't care. A thought occurred to him. On Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, not far from his home, the Navy operated a submarine-listening station, a modern version of the type he once manned. "If you ever get out this way," Balcomb told Johnson, "I'd like to see the Whidbey station."
Johnson brought Gentry with him when he came. The equation had changed considerably by the time they arrived. It was Oct. 3, 2001--three weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Balcomb understood the difficulty now of arguing for whales over national defense. Yet he did not feel inclined to back down.
The Whidbey Island naval base sits on a stunning spit of land some 85 miles northwest of Seattle. Dunes rise between the ocean and a squat concrete building that's protected by cameras, guards and a double line of barbed fencing. Balcomb, as usual, showed up wearing jeans, a blue denim shirt and sockless Birkenstocks. Joining him, all in coats and ties, were Gentry, Johnson and Bill Ellison, an LFA acoustics expert. They slid driver's licenses and photo IDs under a window, then followed a long corridor to a conference room. Balcomb sat down across from Johnson and Gentry.
Gentry studied his friend. Balcomb's appearance didn't surprise him. He never dressed for anyone, never changed for people. Gentry himself had been something of a maverick once, way anti-war. Hell, he'd once looked like Ken. Now he worked with the Navy.
For this, he had no apologies. To him, the Navy had acted responsibly after the stranding. They'd taken only 13 days to provide requested information, fast in the Washington bureaucracy. It just didn't seem to Gentry that they'd stalled. He'd failed to convince Balcomb of this because Ken was sitting impatiently in the Bahamas with nothing else to do. Gentry and his colleagues had careers. They were on the Hill, they had a thousand things going on.
Still, Gentry had to admit, he thought Balcomb's course in life enviable. Any scientist would love to do the Jane Goodall thing. Few had the fortitude. It took real courage for Ken to step back and say, I'm not going to be part of the mainstream.
Joe Johnson began. "We want to address any concerns you have about this system," he told Balcomb, sounding collegial. Particularly, they wanted to talk about Balcomb's theory of resonance. On what did he base his calculations? How did he come up with his frequencies? Why did he think LFA would harm marine mammals?
LFA had been Johnson's mission for more than 15 years. Some in Washington likened his role to that of a used-car salesman, although he insisted he was not an advocate but a "technical manager." He'd been there from the start, an engineer focused on making it work. He'd gone on a number of the sea tests. He'd traveled for months at a time. He'd watched his kids grow up in spurts.
Now he was nearing the finish line. In March, the Fisheries Service had published a proposed rule granting the Navy an exemption. Within weeks, the Navy and the Fisheries Service would issue their joint report on the Bahamas stranding. It seemed to Johnson that they had every angle covered.
Every angle, perhaps, but Ken Balcomb. An "acoustic holocaust" is what Balcomb had called the Bahamas stranding in a widely quoted public letter to Johnson. "It is probable that all Cuvier's beaked whales were killed by the sonar . . . . I cannot legally or morally support any recommendation to deploy LFA." Balcomb's rhetoric had echoed at three contentious public hearings that spring. In April, there'd been a New York Times article featuring his fears about LFA. In May, there'd been a Bahamas Journal of Science article, a relentless account of the mass stranding by Balcomb and his wife, Diane Claridge.
Johnson wanted to pump this man for information; he wanted to learn his intentions; he wanted to see if they could work together. They began trading calculations, navigating the complicated laws of physics. Here, by all accounts, Balcomb's difficulty with the art of conversation showed itself vividly. He jumbled his sentences in such a way that it sounded as if he didn't believe his own resonance theory. Johnson began thinking he'd managed to diminish this man's concerns. Yet they could reach no resolution. Balcomb finally turned the conversation from science to national security. Why, he wondered, does the military need this LFA sonar?
Johnson offered what Balcomb would later describe as a "non-classified briefing." There is no tape of this exchange, but both remember Johnson talking about the threat from submarines operated by non-allied and rogue nations. Anyone with money can build one, Balcomb learned. Anyone can go down to "WarMart" and buy parts. Lots of nations have done just that. After the United States and Russia, Pakistan had the most subs, maybe two dozen, maybe 40. Korea, Iran, China--they all had subs. You didn't even need an enemy nation. A renegade sub captain could take out a carrier. So could terrorists. If you lose a carrier, you have 5,000 dead.
Balcomb found Johnson's briefing all too convincing. He knew that in 1982, the British Royal Navy established dominance in the Falklands with a single submarine attack that sank an Argentine cruiser. He knew that in summer 2000, during an eight-nation Rim of the Pacific exercise in Hawaii, an Australian sub had slipped by defensive systems and "blown up" a U.S. carrier.
Balcomb felt conflicted. It bothered him that people thought he wasn't being patriotic. He knew whales might have to die during warfare; he just didn't want them to die during training exercises. He looked across at Johnson and Gentry. Somewhere in this building, technicians manned a listening post. "Can I have a tour?" Balcomb asked.
They followed a stairway down to a basement and stepped into a room filled with 10 computer stations. Balcomb looked around with wonder. When they worked listening posts in the 1970s, they sat at consoles with carbon stylus printers that traced wavy lines on smudge paper, like the frequency bands of an electrocardiogram. He recalled the printers' loud noise--jut, jut, jut. Here there was only silence.
They wouldn't let him see submarine movements, so just two monitors flickered. A pair of civilians sat at them, watching whales, part of a cooperative project with Woods Hole. Balcomb saw bursts of energy on their screens, dark areas on lighted backgrounds. Thirty years ago in the Navy, he'd watched whales too, but on the sly. Now you could find public reports about whales tracked by these listening posts. Balcomb had been reading them in recent years with envious interest. Born too soon, he guessed.
Johnson and Balcomb fell to talking about the Navy. Johnson, it emerged, had worked at listening posts too. They knew a few of the same people.
Balcomb thought, I could have had his job if I'd stayed in the Navy. I could be in his shoes.
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