The Cold War never ended

OPINION:

On the afternoon of April 4, 1997, I sat cross-legged on the deck of a Canadian Forces CH-124 Sea King helicopter, camera in hand.

I was flying a naval intelligence surveillance mission in U.S. airspace at the entrance to Puget Sound. Our target: a Russian merchant vessel, the Kapitan Man, transiting inbound past a U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine, the USS Ohio, which had surfaced where it should not have been.

The mission was mine. The pilot was Capt. Patrick Barnes, Canadian Forces. I had been told that he was one of the best in his squadron. That turned out to be true. It also turned out to be nearly the last thing that mattered about the day.

We had already made two 360-degree loops around the Kapitan Man and were coming abeam of her on our third pass when the camera hard drive slowed and locked. I waited for it to save the last images before I could shoot again.

That was when a brilliant white flash erupted from the ship’s bridge. It temporarily blinded me, and it hurt.

I looked over at the crew chief and saw his mouth moving, but heard nothing in my headset. My communications were gone. I signaled that I had lost comms.

He plugged my headset into another port. Nothing.

I dismissed the flash as a reflection off the ship’s superstructure and got back to work. We finished the mission and landed at Pat Bay, the Canadian Forces air station on Vancouver Island. I turned in my helmet, ate a boxed lunch and then drove into the base to hand over the camera to Chief Petty Officer Scott Tabor, my U.S. Navy imagery analyst, so he could begin reviewing the images.

When I returned to the office, irritation in my right eye set in. I rubbed it. Then I had a headache — the kind that felt, as I later described it, as if someone had buried a hatchet in the right side of my head.

Chief Tabor watched me from the doorway for a few minutes. Then he asked two questions that would change my life.

“Are you having any trouble with your eyes?” and “Do you have a headache?” I answered yes to both.

He walked over to my desk, laid a printed color photograph in front of me and pointed to a spot on the port-side bridge running light of the Kapitan Man.

“I think you caught a laser beam in this shot,” he said. “That’s what a laser looks like.”

Pat Barnes had taken the same strike. He never flew again. He also never spoke ill of the institutions that decided our injuries were inconvenient enough to deny. He carried the wound in his right eye for the next 29 years — until cancer took him on April 15 of this year.

And deny they did. What followed the strike was not a hunt for the shooter or a demand for accountability. It was gag orders, a denied Purple Heart and an official position that the incident had never happened at all.

This is a position that the Navy has maintained even after the Defense Department’s inspector general found sufficient basis to reconsider it, even after the Navy itself conceded that the ship “may have” fired a laser and even though its own doctrine defines a hostile force as any force that commits a hostile act.

The record has been waiting to be revealed for 29 years.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If the U.S. or NATO intervenes, he threatens to use strategic nuclear weapons in response. He is a madman with an itchy trigger finger.

Chinese aircraft harass ours in the Pacific. The near-peer adversary threat picture is not theoretical. Neither is the cost of institutional silence: What we refuse to acknowledge, adversaries learn they can exploit.

My book, “Blind Treason,” recounts Pat Barnes’ and my ordeal. Washington Times journalist Bill Gertz, who revealed the story in 1997 against official denials, wrote the foreword.

In it, I disclose never-before-seen evidence. The evidence shows an independent finding that someone could indeed have fired a laser capable of causing the retinal injuries Pat and I suffered on April 4, 1997, from the Kapitan Man’s port-side running light at the location that Chief Tabor identified.

I leave its determination and discoverer to the reader.

For those who prefer to believe that the Cold War ended, I have a modest warning: Russia is still our enemy. I have the scars to prove it.

• Jack Daly is a retired naval intelligence officer and the author of “Blind Treason: The True-Life Story of an American Spy Left Out in the Cold.”