by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Hersh and Colby were a generation and a war apart, and at this time, that was a gap galaxies wide. The fifty-four-year-old Colby had walked into the intelligence services during World War II, an era when journalists and novelists vied to craft the most romantic portraits of the nation's spies, of their daring and panache. Hersh, on the other hand, had been practically thrown out of the Pentagon as an Associated Press reporter during the Vietnam War for continuously and hostilely questioning the military's line.
Now Colby stood before Hersh, hoping to make a bargain. He had come to believe that the only way to maintain public support for intelligence efforts was by, as he would say, "bringing intelligence out of the shadows." For his part, Hersh thought Colby "essentially honest." He also believed that was probably a bad thing for a CIA director who had to deal with more hard-line agency veterans.
And so the two men sat down to talk. The director wanted Hersh to hold his story, to stop digging, to not even talk about Project Jennifer. Hersh listened to Colby knowing full well that he was far from ready to go to press. Nonetheless, there was an opportunity here: so Hersh said that he expected Watergate to keep him too occupied to go after Project Jennifer, at least for the next several months. After a hit of bluffing that suggested he knew more about Project Jennifer than he did, Hersh redirected the conversation. Hersh wanted to know about CIA ties to Watergate.
Colby happily answered Hersh's questions, and he left the Tines convinced that he had bought at least two or three months of quiet. Indeed, Hersh was still absorbed in the president's scandal when Glomar left port five months later, and the reporter was still writing about Watergate when she hovered over the Soviet submarine that July in a spot in the Pacific about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii.
It seemed obvious to Colby that his secret was holding. Over the next weeks, he received reports that the only Soviet ships that passed anywhere near Glomar were commercial vessels. Still, many of Glomar's crew members feared the Soviets would figure out what was going on. Most of Glomar's men were roughnecks, recruited from U.S. oil fields, chosen because they could handle Glomar's massive crane and other equipment. None of the men wanted an encounter with the Soviets. The men wanted to get the job done and go home.
New photographs, taken by cameras dangled by Glomar, showed that the Golf was still in much the same condition as when Halibut had found her six years earlier. The Soviet sub was listing toward starboard. Photos taken through missing and damaged hatches made it clear that there was still one intact nuclear missile. The other two had been damaged when the submarine went down.
Except for a hole blown nearly 10 feet wide just behind the conning tower, probably from the explosion that had sunk her, the Golf appeared to be in one piece. Still, there was a good possibility she was fragile. The Navy had estimated that the Golf had slammed to the ocean bottom at as much as 200 knots. That kind of impact could easily have left her broken beneath the steel outer plating. That was one of the key reasons Bradley and Craven had pushed for a more limited recovery effort.
But at that moment, the biggest hurdle was reaching the submarine in the first place. It was a task that one man who recruited Glomar's crew compared to lifting a 25-foot-long steel tube off the ground with a cable lowered from the top of the 110-story World Trade Center, on a pitch-black night haunted by swirling winds.
Computers in the Glomar's control room began flashing information as the giant claw was slowly lowered into the depths. The claw and its steel arm had been nicknamed "Clementine," after the classic miner's lament. Indeed, at least the Soviets believed their boat to be "lost and gone forever."
The arm resembled a huge octopus that would ultimately dangle on a miles-long tether. It had eight grasping claws, three of which supported a huge steel net. The tether itself was being built a piece at a time by Glomar's men who linked sections of pipe, each 60 feet long, one by one, giant tinker toys, creating an ever-lengthening leash dangling ever lower into the ocean. Later, when it was time to try to raise the submarine, crewmen would hoist the claw and the sub by pulling the pieces of pipe from the ocean, dismantling the tether one section at a time.
It took days to lower Clementine to the bottom, days before the grasping claws were hovering directly over the submarine. Then, when the tether was three miles long, Glomar's men and computers labored to compensate for the swirling current so that they could drape the steel net held by three of the claws over the Golf's conning tower. Finally, when cameras showed one of the grasping claws in contact with the sub, the men tried to maneuver the arm closer so the remaining claws could reach around and grab.
But the men miscalculated, sending Clementine crashing into the seabed. They backed the arm part way up, studying the images sent back to the ship. In the murky, partially lit ocean, the arm looked amazingly intact, as though it could still grab. They decided to send Clementine back for another try.
Again they aimed, and again they sent the steel net falling over the conning tower. This time all five claws were in position. It seemed as though Gloinar was going to be able to reel in its catch after all.
Six feet a minute. That was how fast the Golf was pulled toward the surface, 5,000 tons of waterlogged steel. Glomar began to sink deeper into the water against the pull, and then began bucking under the strain. Conversation among the crew shifted from talk of capture to capsizing.
Nine hours passed, and the Golf was 3,000 feet off the seabed. More time, and the submarine was 5,000 feet off the ocean floor, 2 miles away from the surface. Another minute promised to bring another 6 feet of progress. Instead, it brought the wrenching realization that the Golf would never rise any higher.
With one jerk, three of the grasping claws cracked and fell away. They had probably been damaged by the crash into the ocean floor so many hours ago. Now, there were only two claws and the net left holding the forward section of the Golf. The rest of the submarine was dangling mid-ocean, and within moments proved itself just as fragile as Bradley and Craven had predicted six years earlier. The steel of the Golf began to tear at its seams, until the bulk of the sub ripped free from the small section still in Clementine's grasp and fell back into the depths. Back to the ocean floor went the intact nuclear missile, the codebooks, the decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim.
There were no celebrations as the Glomar headed home, no sense of victory that she carried back about 10 percent of a Soviet submarine. Most of this portion was nearly useless from an intelligence standpoint.
Glomar was still out at sea on August 8 when a report came over the radio: Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Air Force One flew Nixon back to San Clemente, California, for the last time, and much of the crew of this, what was perhaps the last top-secret mission he had sanctioned, blamed his demise on the "damned media."
Back in Washington, the political storm that had so engulfed Hersh abated with Nixon's departure. Hersh had heard nothing of Glomar's attempt, nor of its failure. Nor was he alerted when the CIA's underwater experts began plotting a second try for the sunken Golf. But with Nixon out of the White House, Hersh was back on the intelligence heat. That December, he published a huge expose on the front page of the Times, charging that the CIA had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation," compiling dossiers on ten thousand or more American citizens. CIA operatives, the story said, had been shadowing war protesters and infiltrating antiwar organizations.
The CIA would never fully recover from the charges. Hersh's story set off a wave of public and congressional condemnation and scrutiny. In an effort to keep the inevitable investigations in friendly hands, the new president, Gerald Ford, created a blue ribbon commission to examine Hersh's charges. This time, however, younger members of Congress pushed past the old guard who had always shielded the CIA and insisted that the House and the Senate conduct investigations of their own.
Colby and Hersh were still enmeshed with the fallout from the domestic spying story when Project Jennifer
popped back to the surface. It happened on Friday afternoon, February 7, 1975. The early edition of the next day's Los Angeles Times hit the streets screaming news of the recovery attempt in a banner headline splayed across page 1: "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA, Hughes Told."
After holding on to the story for nearly a year, Hersh had been scooped. The Los Angeles Times story had mistakes-it said the sunken sub was in the Atlantic-and gave only limited details. Still, as far as Hersh was concerned, the story was out, and he saw no reason not to step in and finally publish a full account. Colby was just as determined to stop him.
For Colby, the stakes were still huge. Unknown to Hersh, Project .Jennifer was far from over. The CIA was moving ahead with plans for a second recovery attempt. After the first awful failure, CIA technical experts had convinced Colby that the Glomar Explorer could still reach down and steal crucial pieces of the Golf. The Hughes ship was already being refitted and repaired, and the second try was scheduled for that summer. To Colby, it seemed as if he were right back where he had started with Hersh a year earlier.
Colby believed that if the matter died quickly, the Soviets might miss the Los Angeles Times story altogether. But if the article began to get attention, or if Hersh stepped in now with a better rendition of the facts, perhaps with the actual location of the Golf, Colby would have to halt the operation and the agency would have to shoulder another fiasco, one with a huge price tag.
The CIA immediately sent two agents to see the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Their message was simple: Jennifer was not over and publicity could make it impossible for the CIA to bring home the big catch. Neither agent said that there had already been one dismal failure. Nor did they specifically say that plans were afoot for a second attempt. But the editor wasn't asking too many questions-he just agreed to bury the Glomar story on page 18 in the paper's final editions and promised not to run any follow-ups, at least not for the time being.
Colby then called the New York Times publisher and asked him to have Hersh "cool it down a little" on Jennifer. He also returned another call from Hersh, telling him, "You've been first-class about this for a long time."
But the flattery wasn't going to stop Hersh from digging into the story now, and other reporters were jumping on it as well. So Colby crafted a desperate plan, one that was unprecedented in the annals of agency history. He decided to tell dozens of editors and publishers, broadcasters and producers, about Project Jennifer, to give them some details. But his offering carried a price. The editors in turn were being asked to hold the story back. Colby made one last concession: if it looked as though anyone was going to break the embargo, he would call all the others and give them the go-ahead to publish.
He knew full well that keeping Jennifer out of the papers would be about as easy as forcing a lid on a boiling pot. He began describing himself as the center of "the weirdest conspiracy in town."
That's not to say Colby trusted his co-conspirators. The CIA began to monitor some of the reporters who were working on the story. Agents secretly recorded their conversations with journalists, investigated their backgrounds, and rated their performances. There were dozens of secret files. One unidentified West Coast reporter-code-named E-14-was deemed a "journalistic prostitute" and "a heavy drinker."
But above all others, Colby and crew were watching Hersh. They tracked who he talked to on a trip to the West Coast, helped by the fact that many of the people he tried to interview reported straight back to Colby. Among the people Hersh contacted was John Craven, who was now teaching at the University of Hawaii. Although Craven's dreams of building a fleet of small deep-submergence search vehicles had been swamped by the enormous cost of the Glomar Explorer, he wasn't about to cough up the secret. "Project what?" Craven answered when Hersh told him what he was chasing.
Still, Craven agreed to meet Hersh a week later at the ornate Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. The undersecretary of the Navy urged Craven to try to find out who Hersh's sources were, but by the time they got together, fencing and blustering over cocktails, neither man gave up much. It was clear that Hersh had the story in hand whether Craven gave him any help or not.
Finally, on March 18, syndicated investigative columnist Jack Anderson declared an end to the intrigue and prepared to air the story during his show on the Mutual Radio Network. Colby rushed in, but Anderson refused to reconsider.
"I don't think the government has a right to cover up a boondoggle," he said later. "I have withheld other stories at the behest of the CIA, but this was simply a cover-up of a $350 million failure-$350 million literally went down into the ocean." (Government officials later put the cost at more than $500 million.)
The story was out, and Hersh finally got to publish his much-fuller account of Project Jennifer in the next day's New York Times. It ran with a five-column, three-line headline: "CIA Salvage Ship Brought up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles." The banner treatment of the word Failed was enough to make Colby cringe, and the story's lead probably didn't make him feel any better: "The Central Intelligence Agency financed the construction of a multimillion-dollar deep-sea salvage vessel and used it in an unsuccessful effort last summer to recover hydrogen-warhead missiles and codes from a sunken Soviet submarine in the Pacific Ocean, according to high Government officials." Hersh went on to note that the CIA recovered only an insignificant forward chunk of the Golf, and he summed up the assessment of unnamed critics, saying that the possibility of retrieving "outmoded code books and outmoded missiles did not justify either the high cost of the operation or its potential for jeopardizing the United States-Soviet detente."
Overall, the story was a picture of waste, not heroics, and one that some naval officers quietly applauded. The CIA had, after all, been trying to swim in their waters, had stolen their prized find, and had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Project Jennifer was a bust, and in the Navy's eyes, it was also a downright foolish mission to begin with.
Hersh mistakenly wrote that as many as seventy bodies had been recovered in the wreckage, when only six were recovered. But he did also echo one of the points that Colby had been most intent on making, that the CIA had held a burial service for the Soviet dead and videotaped it in case the Soviet Union ever found out about the recovery attempt and demanded information.
Colby himself had stopped talking altogether, rationalizing his belated silence as the only way to prevent the Soviets from being forced into a public reaction. He made that point at a visit to the White House. Toting a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's Memoirs, he showed President Ford where Khrushchev wrote that he had been forced to feign public outrage and cancel a summit meeting in 1960 when Eisenhower openly admitted that the U-2s flying over the Soviet Union were spy planes and not simply weather planes blown off course.
Not wanting to repeat Eisenhower's "error," the Ford administration met all further queries about Glomar with a strict "no comment." That was exactly what the Soviets wanted. They began sending frantic backchannel messages through any contacts they had, begging for U.S. silence-anything to keep the story from Soviet citizens who were still in the dark.` One Soviet naval attache approached a U.S. Navy captain at a party and offered a deal: if the U.S. didn't raise the issue again publicly, the Soviets wouldn't either. Kissinger was having similar conversations as he quietly arranged damage control, among other things promising Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the CIA would drop its plans for a second recovery attempt. Kissinger also gave Dobrynin the names of three young submariners whose metal dog tags had been recovered amid parts of the six bodies in the salvage attempt.
With that, the Soviets seemed to let the matter drop, and in the end Colby's silence left so much mystery surrounding Project Jennifer that myth and reality blurred. The U.S. government had given the Soviets more detailed information than it gave the American public, leaving the press to fill the gap with wildly inaccurate accounts of Glomar's expedition.
Nearly
every newspaper and magazine reported that the United States had recovered the forward third of the 300-foot-long sub. But former Navy officials say that only a 38-foot piece was brought to the surface. Among the initial newspaper accounts, there was also confusion about what type of submarine had been lost. The CIA and other government sources had been unwilling to admit that the target of the whole venture was an antiquated diesel boat. The CIA also clearly leaked misinformation about the Golf's location, telling reporters that the operation had taken place 750 miles northwest of Hawaii when it was really about 1,700 miles away. This probably was done in an effort to throw the Soviets off track.
Ultimately, it seems the agency even convinced some reporters that Project Jennifer had been at least moderately successful, at least judging from some later articles.
Still, the episode created a huge debate among journalists over whether Colby's efforts to quash the story marked one of those moments when the phrase "national security" was used not to save national secrets, but national embarrassment. If anything, Colby's gambit left most journalists increasingly skeptical about acquiescing to requests by intelligence officials to hold back on such stories. Indeed, most reporters wrote that Project Jennifer was a huge failure and that the CIA had gone to great lengths to hide that.
Had the press known the full truth, it would have lambasted the CIA even more. In recent interviews with former top Navy officials, it has become clear that the CIA got away with its most glaring omission of all: the fact that Colby's much-touted plan for a second recovery attempt had been ludicrous from its inception.
In late 1974, several months before Colby's scramble to save the Glomar secret for a second try, the Navy had sent the USS Seawolf back to the Golf's grave site. Seawolf had just been converted to join Halibut as a second "special projects" submarine. Using electronic "fish" to carry cameras down to the lost sub, Seawolf had collected photographs that showed the Golf had shattered after Glomar dropped it and lay in tiny unidentifiable pieces, a vast mosaic decorating the sand.