There have been too many versions of the sinking of the Kursk to imagine that these are due to chaos and not deliberate. The failure of Western Mainstream Media to follow the story is another tipoff. Here is what I know:

On 8/12/00 the Russian navy was involved in their largest exercise in decades. Part of the war game plan called for the Kursk to fire a Squall torpedo. The Squall does not--contrary to the Spanish report--break the surface like a missile. It travels in the sea inside an air envelope, which effectively cuts its friction with the water, increasing its speed to at least 220 mph, and possibly much, much higher.

On that day the Kursk, about to fire a Squall, had its bow damaged by the keel of the USS Memphis. These collisions have happened before, often due to convection layers: layers of seawater of greatly differing temperatures, effectively masking the presence of a vessel in one layer from the electronic sensors of a vessel in a layer above or beneath it. One likely scenario is that the Kursk had armed a Squall torpedo and was about to fire it when the Memphis collided...accidentally or on purpose. At least one other US or Nato sub was in the area.

Allied readings taken at the time record a long grinding noise consistent with a collision of ships, followed two minutes later by an explosion. My guess is that the damage was to the torpedo chamber and it ignited the highly-volatile rocket fuel used by the Squall.

Preliminary reports said there were two vessels lying on the seabed. Within hours, there was only one.

The damaged Memphis limped off to a NATO base in Norway. Wives of twelve Memphis crewmen were secretly flown to Norway. And the Director of the CIA flew to Moscow.

The sequence of the PR spin on the incident is interesting. The first report from Russia was a statement by a dozen or more "prominent" citizens, that the sinking of the Kursk was "an act of war". A week or so later a report came out of Germany that the Kursk had been sunk by a missile fired from the new Russian cruiser Peter The Great.

Several weeks ago the Russians announced they had wormed information from the Norwegians about the Memphis, and alleged it was the sub that had collided with the Kursk.

But the latest official statement from Russia says only that the Kursk was destroyed when a torpedo exploded onboard.

We were also treated to footage showing a relative of a Kursk crewman being injected with a sedative to stifle her protest at the Russian govenment's handling of the event. And former US Naval Intelligence officer Edmond Pope was convicted in Moscow of trying to purchase data on the Squall, but was quickly pardoned and returned to the US.

And now, in this Spanish report, the Russian ship Peter The Great returns.

What are we to glean from all this? Perhaps the exercise may have been to test an anti-Squall missile fired from Peter The Great. But that's guessing. The presence of the Memphis so close to the Kursk is not unusual. We would have been monitoring the exercises, and subs often resort to a Cold War tactic of trying to see how close they can get to an opposing sub undetected. This would not be the first accidental collision.

But would that warrant sending George Tenet to Russia? If, as Gigi claims, we bribed the Russians, then Tenet may have had a hand in the negotiations. Here again, why would we take such measures if the collision were accidental?

I've tracked this story since day one. And it feels like there are missing pieces that aren't going to pop up on the Nightly News.