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THE VOYAGES OF HMS TURPIN 137
shouted out the command to crash dive. This was a perilous
business with the periscope and the snorkel still raised. Water
began pouring into the control room through the snorkel. The
periscope was quickly lowered, and its handles, that weighed
close to a ton, hit Beasley, sending him crashing across the
control room and inflicting a debilitating lifelong neck injury.
The Turpin levelled off at 120 feet below the surface. The
extremely cold water made sonar unreliable at any depth, and
Soviet ships came and went for the next few hours, searching
energetically, but without finding their quarry. Glad to have
evaded the submarine hunters, Commander Coote waited for
them to depart and then set a course for home. 3D
Back in London, the Admiralty Signals Division was doing
what it could to protect the secrecy of its submarine missions.
One of the activities it undertook was a communications security
survey of the radio transmission from HMS Totem, Turpin's
sister ship, while she was on an identical mission off the Soviet
coast code-named 'Operation Defiant'. The results were not
good. The Signals Division warned the Director of Naval
Intelligence that the KGB's listeners, the Soviet equivalent of
GCHQ, might well pick up 'unusual very secret traffic on a
home station submarine broadcast' continuing over a number
of weeks, and might also notice that Totem was absent from the
normal exercise areas. In future, it suggested that a suitable
cover plan with 'dummy communications' be thought up. This
dummy traffic would have to run on a long-term basis if special
submarine operations were to continue to be carried out at short
notice without the Soviets identifying what was going on. 3J
Tony Beasley's next mission to the Arctic Circle, 'Operation
Sanjak', was yet more eventful. In July 1955 HMS Turpin had
been loitering off the Soviet coast for over two weeks, but was
experiencing problems with its elint equipment. Reception was
good while the submarine was stationary, but not when it was
in motion. They moved to the western edge of their patrol area
so they could surface and see what was wrong. After a perilous
climb up the submarine fin in a rolling sea, the problem, which