SHIP OF SECRETS : HINTS OF SPY ROLE EMERGE DURING REFIT.

Byline: Steve Geissinger Associated Press 

Maury has a secretive past, though people do know she was terribly unreliable and went through way too much money.

But now everyone around her says that's all behind her.

``Rumors go around that this is what she did; no, this is what she really did,'' says Leonard Aguilar, a 34-year-old maritime cadet.

As recently as the early 1990s, Maury was on the high seas apparently spying for the United States, says its new owner, the California Maritime Academy. Though the Navy denies the assertion, it acknowledges that the 7-year-old ship had a highly-classified role in anti-submarine warfare.

Whatever its work, the ship's propulsion system proved unreliable even though the vessel cost $200 million. And then the Cold War ended.

Cadets and faculty at the California Maritime Academy near San Francisco are helping to rework the surplus ship as a sea-going classroom. Covered in sweat and grease, they toil in a confining maze of passageways, compartments and stairs below deck.

The Navy gutted high-security sections within the hull of the 500-foot vessel before releasing it as a training ship. But there's enough left behind to provide a rare glimpse inside what may have been a spy ship.

There are plenty of clues to a mysterious role beyond its official assignment of mapping the deep-sea bottom for submarines, according to academy officials.

Maury was ``much more sophisticated than anything else that ever existed for charting the deepest parts of the ocean,'' says the academy's Capt. John Keever, a 26-year mariner overseeing the refit.

``Some of this ability to very carefully sense what went on under the water that was good for map making, probably was good for some other kind of data gathering,'' says Keever.

But, he adds, ``the secret parts of her past aren't in the official history.''

The ship may have been listening for submarines or eavesdropping on conversations through undersea cables between the Soviet Union and its friends, according to popular theories at the academy.

Marge Holtz, a spokeswoman for the Navy's Military Sealift Command, which operated the vessel, denied any role by the Maury beyond mapping. She said its sea-bottom charting provided the Navy detailed maps for its missile-firing Trident submarines. The subs could then make high-speed runs through undersea canyons or hide in them.

``The Maury's only mission ... was that of deep-ocean charting,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Rob Newell, a Navy spokesman.

Relatively few in the 108-person crew, including regular Navy personnel and scientists, were likely to have known all the secrets. ``Even if you could find them, they wouldn't be likely to talk,'' says Keever.

Above deck, the ship looks like a cross between a passenger vessel and a freighter. But inside the hull, academy officials say clues to its secrets abound.

Keever points out the red telephone on the bridge for private talks with Washington, storage for an unusually large small-arms cache, numerous ``restricted area'' warnings, and excessive communication and electricity generation capacities.

A labyrinth of compartments is hidden behind security rooms equipped for guards. Entrance into the access rooms was controlled with electronic devices.

``This is where whatever else that went on, went on,'' Keever says.

Photo: Capt. John Keever is overseeing the refit of ex-Navy ship Maury, in background. The Maury was involved in highly-classified activities as recently as the early 1990s.

Associated Press

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