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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.
Ed Offley has been a military reporting specialist
for newspapers and online publications since 1981, including
The Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Virginia, The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, Stripes.com
and DefenseWatch magazine. He is currently Military
Reporter for The News Herald in Panama City, Florida.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, Offley served in
the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He lives in Panama City Beach, Florida.
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