McMoneagle reports a new Soviet submarine class (1979)

In September 1979 the Defense Intelligence Agency handed a sealed envelope to Joseph McMoneagle, a chief warrant officer working at a small Army intelligence facility on Fort Meade. The envelope contained a photograph of a large building near Severodvinsk, a port city on the White Sea in the far north of the Soviet Union. McMoneagle was asked to describe what he believed was inside.

McMoneagle later wrote that he reported, over a series of sessions, the construction of an extremely large submarine, much larger than anything then in the United States fleet. He described a flat top with what he understood to be at least eighteen large missile tubes arranged in two rows running forward of the sail, twin hulls in parallel, and unusually wide internal corridors. He drew sketches of the cross-section.

The building in the photograph was Severodvinsk Shipyard No. 402, also called Sevmash. Inside it, the Soviet Navy was assembling the first of the Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarines, designated Project 941. The first Typhoon was launched in September 1980 and entered service in late 1981. It carried twenty SLBM tubes in a forward-mounted, parallel arrangement. It had a double-hull design. At more than 48,000 tons submerged, it remains the largest submarine ever built.

McMoneagle's own account of the session, in his 2002 memoir The Stargate Chronicles, is the version most cited in the published literature on the program. The session report itself is in the declassified Stargate collection, though the photographs and supporting analyst material remain partly redacted. How much the United States already knew about the Typhoon program through satellite imagery and signals intelligence in 1979 is harder to settle. The portions of the National Reconnaissance Office record from that period that have been declassified do not specifically address the question.

In 1984 the Army awarded McMoneagle the Legion of Merit. The citation, declassified later, named several intelligence-related tasks the award was intended to recognize. The Severodvinsk session was one of them. McMoneagle left the active viewer program shortly after the award and went on to work as an outside consultant for the project until its shutdown in 1995.