Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

  "It dissolved just like that, like an Alka-Seltzer in water," one former high-ranking naval officer says. "It spread all over acres on the ocean floor." Said another former Navy official: "It shattered. The judgment was made that there was no possibility to recover anything more."

  These men say that there was almost no chance of finding relatively small items like warheads, code machines, and antennas. And the officers were amazed that the CIA didn't seem to recognize that. Among the Navy men who stood out as critics of the second recovery effort were Captain Bradley, who, though retired, was a consultant to NURO, and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had become the director of Naval Intelligence in September 1974.

  But the CIA had pushed the project forward nonetheless. The agency's only apparent concession to the Golf's condition was to replace some of the Glomar's grasping claws with a huge scoop. The CIA was hoping to blindly sweep up something significant among the broken pieces.

  Colby told none of this to the newspaper editors. All he said was that, given a second chance, the CIA could have recovered the submarine, or at least important chunks of the conning tower and missile bay. Later, Colby said that he didn't remember ever examining the Seawolf photographs himself and that he was relying instead on the analysis of his technical experts.

  "We were all very convinced that if we could get back we could get something," Colby said. "Otherwise, why the hell go for it? It wouldn't have made any sense."

  What he may have failed to take into account was that his experts were far from objective. They had spent years on Project Jennifer, had been responsible for its huge cost, and in the end they could easily have been more concerned about their professional lives than the lives of the Glomar crewmen. Colby himself knew that the CIA couldn't afford another embarrassment, not when it was suffering politically from other disclosures.

  Carl Duckett, the CIA's chief official on the Glomar project, has died, leaving his views on the odds of success for the second phase of Project Jennifer a mystery. CIA records on Project Jennifer are still classified. And Duckett's top deputy, Zeke Zelmer, has refused to discuss the matter. Colby died in 1996, but insisted to the end that a second recovery attempt could have been profitable.

  But the former Navy officers believe that the CIA officials were desperate to believe their own myth, desperate to believe that victory was still possible and they had not wasted so much money.

  Craven's theory is far more blunt. "It was just a big, fat plum that looked juicy," he says. "And they turned loose some guys who as far as the ocean was concerned were a bunch of amateurs."

  About that, Hersh agreed with Craven. His already well-honed cynicism sharpened, Hersh began digging into the Navy's regular submarine operations, and in May 1975 he published an account of Holystone, of submarine trailing and surveillance missions taking place in or near Soviet waters.

  Hersh also revealed that there had been a number of collisions between U.S. and Soviet subs, that a U.S. spy sub had once grounded briefly in the approaches to Vladivostok harbor and that some White House and CIA officials were questioning whether the flood of U.S. submarines in Soviet waters made sense in the age of detente. After his story appeared, he received a call from a man who had been on Gato during its collision with the Soviet Hotel in 1969, and Hersh published an account of that in early July. By this time, Congress was looking into intelligence abuses. The Senate, led by Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, was investigating incidents included in a CIA document that catalogued its own abuses-from domestic spying to international assassination attempts. Church had already unnerved the once-proud and untouchable agency, calling it "a rogue elephant."

  But the intelligence community was more worried about an investigation in the House, where a New York Democrat, Otis G. Pike, was leading his own broader investigation, looking at Kissinger, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and the Navy. He also was setting out to gauge the value of the Navy's submarine spying efforts-something no other congressman had attempted in the thirty years since the cold war began.

  Pike, fifty-three, was a maverick and a jokester, but more important, he was cheap. He always wore old suits in various stages of disrepair, usually serious disrepair. And he was a man who years earlier had speared the Navy for gross overspending in cartoonish depictions of admirals collecting hazard flight pay for the dangers they encountered sitting at their desks. It was Pike's investigating that led to the running jokes about toilet seats and wrenches that cost the military hundreds of dollars. When he took over the House investigation into intelligence activities, the press touted him as the consummate outsider, despite the fact that he was a product of Princeton University and Columbia University School of Law, a longtime member of the House Armed Services Committee, and a Marine war hero.

  Pike was now promising that in just six months he would scrutinize cold war spying. For the submarine force, that meant Pike was threatening to poke into trailings, incursions into foreign territorial waters, and collisions. The Navy was worried that he would publicize its most classified missions. After all, he had led the House investigation into the Pueblo fiasco, determining that a gross lack of analysis and oversight was responsible for placing the spy ship in harm's way off the coast of North Korea.

  Perhaps another congressman would have planned such an ambitious investigation in oak-lined conference rooms or over scotch in one of Washington's private clubs, the kind that don't bother to put the prices on their menus. But Pike planned his investigation sitting in his skivvies over supermarket beer with Aaron B. Donner, his longtime campaign manager, in the small apartment near Capitol Hill that they shared as a Washington, D.C., residence since their families were still living in Long Island. They plotted strategy with the enthusiasm of students plotting their first campus demonstration. True to Pike's character, they decided that he would attack the nation's most powerful intelligence agencies with a cost-benefit analysis.

  Pike's congressional committee was backed by a young staff, several of them fresh from the Watergate inquiry. They brought with them a deep distrust for the political establishment, for authority, and especially for anything stamped "secret." These staffers were irreverent. They were brazen. They were Pike's marauders.

  They began asking questions: What do the intelligence agencies do? What do they cost taxpayers? How much use do they get out of the massive amount of information they collect? And weren't a lot of their risky and expensive ventures just plain redundant?

  One of the most obvious places to start was Project Jennifer, which struck Pike as a massive failure at best, or an all-out boondoggle, a blank check written to the Howard Hughes corporations, perhaps even a political payoff. Had Craven been privy to Pike's hunches, he would have cheered. As Pike began digging, Colby tried the approach that had seemed to work so well with newspaper editors and that seemed to be working with the Senate. He offered up some details, enough, he hoped, to win over his critics. At a Pike hearing on Project Jennifer, Colby and company put on their best cloak and dagger for the occasion, insisting on a closed room for what was arguably the nation's worst-kept secret.

  The congressmen were already in session in the Armed Services Committee hearing room when the CIA contingent arrived. First in was a small army of dour young men wearing dark suits and what looked like buttons in their ears-earphones for their walkie-talkies. They swept the room with electronic gear, searching for bugs in corners and under tables and chairs. Pike and the other congressmen watched transfixed by the living theater.

  Then a second, smaller contingent of agents came in, carrying big black suitcases, the sort that museums use for transporting priceless figurines. These men also began to scout the room, though none of the congressmen could figure out what the agents were looking for. It was as though two acts had been staged to make the committee feel a sense of occasion. The effect was working.

  Finally, in walked Colby and some of his deputies, triggering Act 3. The cases snapped open, and CIA men began gingerly to lift out large p
lastic bags, gently placing them on a long table set up before the congressmen. The committee members leaned forward and looked down, peering through the clear plastic at these top-secret items that had been carried here under guard.

  A throat might have been cleared here and there, but for the most part the members were silent. Actually, nobody knew quite what to say. The objects laid out so ceremoniously on the table seemed to be nothing more than a collection of metal chunks that looked suspiciously like rusty iron.

  The lawmakers examined the chunks, feigning reverence. Despite themselves, they had an overwhelming sense that something momentous was taking place as Colby solemnly announced that they were hefting pieces of a Russian submarine. It was only later that they admitted to one another that they could have been looking at anything, even refuse from a construction site down the street, and the CIA's presentation of charts and ocean diagrams seemed to hold just about as much significance. As for questions of cost and benefit, these Colby deftly evaded with vague explanations that totals were unavailable with most of the funding hidden in other, more mundane budgets. Colby's performance was masterful. By the time the show was over, not a single member of the committee had remembered to raise the question of Howard Hughes.

  But the CIA's show left the congressmen with a lingering sense that they had been had. The feeling didn't go away when Colby later tried to impress the committee with a show of secret-agent gear, including what agents called a "micro-bio-inoculator," a device that looked like a gun but shot needles dipped in a drug that attacked the central nervous system. Pike's rebellious staff became outraged by the CIA's antics. If anything, the show put on to justify the Glomar Explorer left the staff more determined than ever to dig into a broad spectrum of submarine missions, and Pike's marauders began looking into the issues Hersh had raised in his stories about Holystone and the Gato collision.

  Word quickly got around the Navy that Pike wasn't playing by the old rules, or any rules-that he was trying to take a hard look at the most secret operations. Some admirals were recommending that the Navy simply stonewall him. But a few submariners, veteran enlisted men, phoned the committee with stories about submarine groundings, falsified patrol reports, and news of another collision in which a Soviet submarine had been struck and was presumed lost.

  The disclosures were unprecedented. Nothing in Pike's tenure on the Armed Services Committee had prepared him for any of this. Most members of that committee were told little about submarines, even about the basic surveillance ops. Before Watergate wrecked the old congressional seniority system and elevated some younger firebrands like Pike, the submarine community had been allowed to run past Congress. When a nod was needed, well, there was always a senator or two who could be counted on to push a program through-especially the late Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who single-handedly oversaw most intelligence programs in the I 960s. (Or as Admiral Moorer, who supported the Glomar operation as CNO and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1967 to 1974, put it: "Generally speaking, in the sixties, it was sufficient simply to tell Senator Russell that you were doing it, and no one else, and it never leaked.")

  Things got really interesting when somebody phoned with a description of a submarine that could search deep, a submarine able to sit on a seafloor. It wasn't long before Pike's crew heard about the cable taps recording away beneath the Sea of Okhotsk.

  The source was one of the Navy's handpicked elite, one of the men of the Halibut, and he was frightened. He was still in the Navy. He was still hound to secrecy. He was not supposed to be talking to anyone, certainly not a congressman known not only for kicking military tires but for pricing them, scrutinizing them, and complaining loudly and publicly when he found them to be flat. This was, for any submariner, a potentially career-crashing move.

  Pike's staffers did what they could to reassure the man. They just asked him to point out what they should explore. The exploration, they promised, would occur through other means. They would confront the Pentagon directly. They saw no reason to haul some low-level guy up before a public committee, no reason to destroy an informant.

  And so the submariner talked-of the Bat Cave, of Okhotsk. Then another man from special projects called. In the end, both submariners were actually looking for answers, much as Halibut's chiefs had been when White refused to get back on the sub in Guam. They wanted to know how invading Soviet waters and planting the telephone tap to end all telephone taps during talk of detente was going to accomplish anything. They wanted to know why they were being asked to sit as targets in a Soviet sea. They wanted to know whether the submarine command had become overzealous and reckless, whether their lives were being risked in patently illegal operations. They were sworn to go in harm's way. This they accepted. But they wanted to know, why these risks, why this mission? They especially wanted to know why they were being sent to a Soviet sea in two of the oldest and loudest submarines in the fleet. By this point in late 1975, Halibut had completed her last mission and was going to be taken out of service entirely. Seawolf, the boat taking Halibut's place, was turning out to be even more of a clunker.

  As Pike's team began to follow up on these concerns, one of his most driven young staffers, Edward Roeder III, was assigned to take the lead. Admiral James L. Holloway III, who was now the chief of naval operations, countered with Inman, the director of Naval Intelligence.

  Roeder was all of twenty-five years old, a former freelance journalist who was seen by the rest of Pike's staff as demanding and cantankerous and somewhat overzealous in his attempts at gaining information. Other staffers were apalled when he tried to date a secretary at the National Security Agency, hoping to get her to spill secrets over dinner or coffee-a maneuver that turned out to be a complete failure.

  Still, Roeder was able to put a very human face on much of the mystery surrounding the high-tech undersea spy war, and even his critics believed he had come up with a shrewd explanation of how the secrets of decades had survived most of those moments when the United States and the Soviet Union caught one another in action. The way Roeder saw it, the United States and the Soviet Union were behaving much like two men in a smoke-filled room endlessly playing cards. Both of them were cheating, but neither was able to accuse the other because that would end the game.

  Now Roeder had to figure out how to break through to a world where the U.S. Navy was protecting not only its own methods but its enemy's as well. What Roeder didn't figure on, however, was Bobby Inman. Inman had already decided to shock Pike and his staff with facts.

  Inman was ignoring the pointed suggestions inside the Navy that he should remain silent, certain that wouldn't work. Just a couple of years before, he had served as an executive assistant to Holloway when he was the vice chief of Naval Operations. It was Inman's job to monitor Congress and the press. While there were few challenges to the sanctity of naval secrecy in those days, even the Navy had to suffer through budget hearings. He had watched as budgets were slashed after Hollywood-handsome admirals marched into hearings armed with cadres of assistants but few answers. On the other hand, he had also watched programs survive after being represented by overweight, unkempt, and gruff officers facing Congress sans entourages but with information and courtesy.

  Now he approached Roeder and the rest of Pike's staff with little of the expected burnish of his brass. He didn't look or speak like any other admiral. Instead, he was plain, skinny, and decked out in hornrimmed glasses and a uniform with a collar so worn and oversized that the admiral's stars on his shoulders seemed out of place. Pike's staffers saw him as "kind of scary smart." But what surprised them more was that the head of Naval Intelligence seemed willing to cooperate. Inman had decided to head off any criticism or unwanted attention by giving Pike what he wanted, at least some of what he wanted. Inman wanted to hand Pike enough information to swing him around to the Navy's basic point of view: that submarine operations were providing critical information that could be obtained in no other way, and that they were actually sav
ing lots of money by helping the Navy tailor its own construction programs to a well-defined Soviet threat.

  With the CNO's blessings, Inman met Roeder with promises to research submarine collisions and groundings. Inman also said that he would look into the cable-tapping. There was a condition, though. Inman wanted guarantees that none of the information would leak. He insisted that the most sensitive documents be held in a safe, a so-called 20-minute safe, one that took that long to burn open with an acetylene torch. Roeder promised to use the safe and promised that only he would have the combination. But when he brought that demand to his bosses on Pike's staff, they told him that no such safe was available. They also quickly determined that Roeder had become a little full of himself. In a grand gesture, perhaps out of honor, perhaps out of selfimportance, Roeder quit over the issue, certain that Inman would know he had walked out in the name of national security.

  The gesture did impress the admiral, but not enough for him to give up his effort to win over Pike and crew. Instead, Inman simply turned his brand of open and honest charm on Pike and the rest of his staff. They met several times in the committee's inner sanctum, a windowless room that staffers called the "Cone of Silence" in salute to Get Smart, the popular comedy series about spies. Actually it was more like a horrible little closet, with barely space for chairs around the 18 inch-wide conference table. Within the room hung a seemingly permanent cloud of stale smoke. Inman ignored his dingy surroundings and just talked. There was, he admitted, too little coordination between submarine operations and the more statesmanlike mission of detente. By offering all this without doublespeak and without excuses, he separated himself from the larger intelligence community and endeared himself to Pike's staff.