Secret Russians

Way back in the day my best friend Steve joined the Navy. He'd been a PO in the Cadet Corps and it was all he wanted to do. We had a mutual interest in things that floated - the bigger the better. As kids we eagerly roamed over visiting American aircraft carriers taking some R and R from the Vietnam War. I was young, and politics hadn't impacted my life yet.

Some few years later, he handed me photocopied pages of a training manual. They were silhouettes of Soviet Navy ships, below the stern heading, TOP SECRET. Carefully, I concealed them in my bottom drawer and, late at night, I'd worshipfully pull them out and pore over the pages. I'd never had anything TOP SECRET before. From then on I decided on a career as a spy - it seemed cooler than the army.

I committed to memory profiles of Kresta IIs, Victor 1s and the mighty Moskva. I memorised the dimensions, offensive capability and estimated performance of each vessel. Before long, I could converse knowingly on all things Soviet Navy - that is, if I could without exposing myself as a spy.

But wait, I thought, wouldn't the Soviets know all this shit anyway? What would stolen information about their own fleet tell them anything new? 'Aha, they think our Sovremennyy's are 2 knots slower than they are. ' Big deal! That is if they recognised the NATO Class name instead of Projekt 58 Protivoladochny Korabl - their own name.

And shouldn't such information be put into the public domain, anyway? Our coastal residents might then be able to report in exact detail the next time a Soviet Naval task force sailed close by. That is, if there were any Soviet Naval ships within 10,000 kilometres of us - which, of course, there never were.

The Manual was complete - that is, there were vessels in there that had been built in the 20's. An ice breaker had originally been built for the Tsarist Navy and a sail training ship had been part of the booty handed over by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. It would take a stretch of the imagination to believe the Russians were so short of ships they were still using them 50, 60 years later. The mighty 'Morskoi Flotta', the 2nd largest fleet in the World, and still using coal fired ships built for the Tsar? And, besides that, the Royal New Zealand Navy regarded information on these ships TOP SECRET? I could read Jane's All The World's Ships and have access to far more up to date information than the RNZN provided for their training. I could buy a copy of Jane's and apply to the Navy for a job as a trainer - that is, if I hadn't already decided on a career as a Soviet spy.

Disappointed, I came to realise the alleged TOP SECRET manual was far from either TOP SECRET or a training manual. Rather, it likely came from the recesses of a library, probably from the historic section. It was a piece of nostalgia only, perhaps for old Navy men to reminisce over.

"Remember that Russian sailing ship we spotted off North Korea in '55?"

"Sure, it was accompanied by that ice breaker with the tall funnel belching coal smoke."

"Y'see that gun she had, Soupy?"

"Never forget it - a swivel mounted, black powder, smooth bore firing a 9 pound iron ball."

"Hey, yeah, I shit myself. I'm glad it wasn't a shooting war."

I still have that manual for the day Russia's coal fired fleet comes sailing over the horizon to enfilade our coastal defenses with grape shot.

Don