Eyewitness Reports From Operation RIPTIDE (Patreon)

A tome for Delta Green, excerpted from Delta Green: The Conspiracy. 

In English. Study time: days. Unnatural +3%, SAN loss 1D4.

This boxed collection of tapes and transcriptions describes a little-known, highly classified episode during a historic submarine recovery effort.

On April 10, 1963, the USS Thresher nuclear attack submarine sank with all hands about 200 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The next day, Delta Green’s leaders approved Operation RIPTIDE. Under the cover of recovery efforts, a week-long assault dropped airborne antisubmarine bombs and depth charges in deep waters around Devil Reef, a formation rising from an unusually deep chasm less than two nautical miles from the Massachusetts shore.

Statements by crew of the destroyers Dewey and Shenandoah, pulled from training with Cruiser-Destroyer Flotilla Four, corroborate angry reports by witnesses on shore of underwater explosions at the reef. The Navy explained that the ships were searching for classified technology from the Thresher and destroying what could not be recovered.

Audiotape captured a brief exchange between two unnamed officers. One asks, “Why aren’t they hitting back?” The other asks, “How do we even know they’re still there?” The first does not respond.

One heavily redacted memorandum appears to be a drafted order, never issued, to deploy the W44 nuclear depth charge at Devil Reef. A handwritten scrawl says the idea was voted down by “EXCOMM.” The memo does not explain that Delta Green’s Executive Committee had voted the order down by 4-3, worried over the effects of a 10-kiloton nuke detonated so near a populated coast.

RECOMMENDED RITUALS: None.

Written by Shane Ivey, © the Delta Green Partnership.