WASHINGTON — By all accounts former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, was thrilled when he, as a former naval officer and submariner, found out in the late 1990s that the U.S. Navy would name its newest attack submarine in his honor.
But until the submarine’s commander, Don Kelso, and a retired Navy admiral overseeing its development showed up at his home in Plains, Georgia, Carter had no idea that his namesake warship held a wealth of secrets known only to a handful of people. Over the course of an afternoon, Kelso, then a Navy captain commanding the USS Jimmy Carter in the final stages of its development in early 2005, sat at Carter’s dining room table as the retired admiral briefed the former president on the submarine’s unique capabilities. “He was in awe,” Kelso said in an interview.
“He knew it was a special submarine, because he had some background there, but he didn’t know all the details before then of what it could really do.” Publicly, just about the only detail the Navy or Kelso will acknowledge is that the USS Jimmy Carter is an advanced Seawolf-class submarine — an undersea hunter-killer designed for special missions. But as the warship neared its commissioning date in February 2005, it became clear that it had been built specifically to replace a legendary spy sub, which for decades took on daring high-risk intelligence collection operations such as tapping underwater Soviet communications lines.
To make room for divers and.
