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She had a shark's mouth hatch in her forward deck. To most submariners, that hatch screamed: "Flooding!" On her stern she carried the first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle - at least that's what the public thought, as did the ever-watchful Soviet intelligence agents manning a myriad of "trawlers" stationed unobtrusively off the California coast.

But the USS Halibut (SSN 587) was something else, something else entirely.

Under the shark's mouth hatch loomed the Bat Cave - 28 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 30 feet high - containing three levels of sophisticated technology, including a state-of-the-art Univac 1124 computer (about as powerful as a modern top-of-the-line hand-held programmable calculator).

Halibut carried two aluminum tethered "fish" that were launched from the bottom of the Bat Cave that could descend to 20,000 feet. These fish were outfitted with lights, recorders and all kinds of sensors.

The miniature submarine that appeared to be moored atop her stern, announced publicly as the first of several DSRVs - Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles - was actually welded to the deck. In fact, it was a pressure chamber designed to hold several saturation divers who could lock out of the chamber to retrieve objects from the sea floor more than a thousand feet down.

This is not a trailer for the latest sci-fi techno thriller. It's real. It happened. And nobody knew about it - well almost nobody.

The dramatically modified Halibut and her equally mysterious sister submarines USS Seawolf (SSN 575) and USS Parche (SSN 683) were the final products of a fantastic dream of Navy scientist John P. Craven, who wanted to do nothing less than surreptitiously retrieve Soviet missile pieces from their oceanic splash zone, and somehow tap into their underwater communications cables.

Like his arch-nemesis and close colleague, Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, Craven instinctively knew how to get things done inside the vast government bureaucracy and its CIA and Navy subsidiaries. Hidden within the budgets of a dozen or so innocuous projects, and blazing its own deep cover trail inside the Man-In-the-Sea and the DSRV Programs, Craven's project was born and grew to maturity in total secrecy. There were no leaks - absolutely none - until January 1980, when for a measly $35,000, NSA employee Ronald W. Pelton told the Soviets about the "Ivy Bells" cable-tapping project.

Back in the Summer of 1965, Astronaut Scott Carpenter joined the SeaLab II project 205 feet deep off La Jolla just north of San Diego.

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