The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  He could be, at times, parsimonious with his words. Parangosky knew what he wanted and how to get it, and he preferred to avoid conflict unless it was absolutely necessary. When he entrusted a subordinate to handle a matter, that trust was absolute and he didn’t want to get options in return.

  Tact was a specialty, but he moderated its use depending on the audience. In the presence of women, younger employees, or anyone with a fragile ego, Parangosky operated gently, but he was ready and willing to stand up and face down bigger, blunter personalities, too. He could smooth out the rough edges of a meeting within fifteen minutes of sitting down.

  People didn’t want to disappoint the boss or miss a deadline, and much was accomplished based solely on fear of John Parangosky.

  He was a master of the butchered metaphor, often telling his security guys, when something required better oversight, that “I want a fly on the wall with his feet planted firmly on the floor in that meeting so I can know what’s really going on.” And the answer was never to correct him. You just said, “Okay, John.”

  • • •

  Playing a key role in a second compartmentalized CIA Science and Technology program, code-named Oxcart, this time in a much more direct and intimate capacity, deeply influenced Parangosky’s management style within the Agency. It changed him from a promising project leader to one of the most effective managers at the CIA.

  Parangosky admired what Kelly Johnson was doing at the Skunk Works, where he was simultaneously reinventing management and designing some of the most impressive machines ever created. The Skunk Works was its own airplane company inside of the larger Lockheed Corporation, and it had its own rules, written by Johnson.

  The Oxcart team was even smaller than the one that designed the U-2, and to hasten progress Johnson and Ben Rich removed the door that separated the aerodynamics group from the structures team. That worked so well that they decided to remove all the doors, mashing the whole bunch together, so that solving a problem became as easy as yelling across the room.

  After eleven rejected but incrementally better airplane designs, the twelfth was approved. Johnson called it the A-12 and returned from a one-on-one meeting with Bissell with clear and simple orders: The CIA would buy five planes at a cost of 96.6 million dollars. They would allow Johnson’s shop to do work exactly as it had on the U-2, with one change: even more secrecy.

  • • •

  Actually building the A-12 required a complete rethinking of every single piece on the plane, starting with the metal used for its frame and skin. Johnson settled on titanium, which has the highest strength-to-density ratio of any metal on earth, but which no one had ever used on a plane before. Titanium worked—while causing all sorts of problems. For instance, it was so strong that all of the Skunk Works’ existing tools and bolts were rendered useless, forcing Johnson to reinvent those, too. What was more, there wasn’t enough titanium available in the United States, so the CIA had to use subcontractors and dummy companies to covertly buy the rare alloy from, of all places, the Soviet Union.

  Virtually every piece of the A-12 had to be designed to withstand the extreme stresses the plane would be under. The hydraulic lines were stainless steel, the plumbing lines gold plated. Some parts required alloys that sounded like they’d been made up—Hastelloy X for the ejector flaps, for instance, or Elgiloy, more typically used for watch springs, on the control cables. In total, the Skunk Works would manufacture 13 million different parts by the time the A-12 project was completed.

  Johnson underestimated the complexity of the project, and by the end of 1960 he swallowed his pride and told Parangosky that Lockheed wasn’t going to hit the original deadline. He needed another year.

  The engine, in particular, was a struggle, and Parangosky’s patience was under constant assault as delays and costs increased by the day. The A-12 required the most powerful engine ever made, which would allow it to fly continuously on its afterburners. To build an engine this complicated, Pratt & Whitney had to build a new factory at its Florida complex, and the CIA, after much hand-wringing by Bissell and Parangosky, swallowed the 600-million-dollar tab. Parangosky called it the “Macy’s engine” after he told a colleague, at the height of his frustration, that “if we gave as much money to R. H. Macy’s they could build that engine in time for Christmas.”

  Parangosky reached his limit. He and Bissell agreed that Johnson needed a babysitter, and in mid-1960 he flew to Burbank and told Kelly that if he wouldn’t allow a CIA engineer to work inside the Skunk Works, he couldn’t guarantee the project’s survival.

  Johnson hated that idea, of course. “I’m not gonna have one of your spies poking into my business!” he yelled. “Bissell promised me you guys would keep hands off and let me do the thing my way.”

  “Be reasonable, Kelly,” Parangosky replied. “We won’t get in your way. We just want someone here you can trust and we can, too.”

  Seeing no choice, Johnson acceded. Parangosky made it easier for him by offering up an engineer he knew Johnson liked and trusted—Norm Nelson, an old acquaintance from World War II.

  “I’ll let Norm in, but not another goddamn person,” Johnson snapped. “You tell Nelson he can have a desk and a phone, but no chair. I expect him in the shop, not sitting on his fat duff.”

  Nelson was a sharp engineer and a better office politician, so despite being the first government employee ever to work inside the Skunk Works, he turned out to be both welcome and useful. Nelson was unafraid to challenge Johnson and proved his worth numerous times, such as when the CIA gave the Skunk Works 20 million dollars to build special wing tanks to extend the plane’s range. Nelson looked at the design, scratched out some calculations, and told the engineers that they were extending the range by only eighty miles. In Nelson’s estimation, that didn’t justify the time and engineering required to build the tanks. Johnson agreed and sent the 20 million dollars right back to Langley.

  • • •

  When the CIA’s new director, Richard Helms, witnessed his first A-12 flight, in January 1962, the experience was so visceral that he could hardly process what he was seeing. “I was so shaken,” he told Ben Rich, “that I invented my own name for [the plane]. I called it the Hammers of Hell.” The A-12’s more popular nickname was the Blackbird, named for the black body paint chosen because it lowered the temperature of the titanium by thirty-five degrees.

  Every test flight was an event. The pilots covered huge distances in small amounts of time, often moving so fast that they’d witness three or four sunrises on a single three-hour flight. Pilots flew from New York City to London in an hour and fifty-five minutes, London to Los Angeles in three hours and forty-seven minutes, and Los Angeles to Washington in sixty-four minutes, breaking records on a daily basis.

  To fly the long distances required to reach the Soviet Union, the plane would require multiple in-air refuelings, and every one of them was hair-raising. In order to mate, the hulking KC-135 tankers had to fly at their absolute maximum speed while the Blackbird pilot would throttle his plane back as much as possible, so that he was on the verge of stalling out. When the supersonic planes returned to base, pilots and mechanics puzzled over the tiny black dots that pitted the windshields. Test samples came back as organic material. The source: insects that had been sucked up into the stratosphere during Russian and Chinese nuclear tests and were just winging around the earth in the jet stream, seventy-five thousand feet up.

  • • •

  Once operational, the Blackbird proved its worth again and again. The primary detachment of CIA pilots and crew was based on Okinawa, outside of the town of Kadena. The location was ostensibly secret, but the Blackbird was so loud and peculiar-looking that the locals took notice almost immediately. Within days, they began gathering on a hill that overlooked the base in hopes of watching this incredible plane take flight. They nicknamed it Habu, for a highly poisonous jet-black pit viper indigenous to
the island.

  Word of the location spread quickly. Soviet spy ships disguised as fishing trawlers would cruise off the coast, observing takeoffs and relaying the departure times back to North Vietnam, the primary target of overflights in the late 1960s. It didn’t matter. The planes were too fast for antiair defenses, so the CIA paid no attention to the spying. They chose flight times based on when the light was best, and every twelve-thousand-mile round trip resulted in reams of intelligence. A single Blackbird could photograph one hundred thousand square miles per hour, with the ability to zoom in up to twenty times, providing enough resolution from eighty-five thousand feet to look down into the hatches of container ships unloading materiel in Haiphong harbor.

  When the North Koreans boarded and commandeered the USS Pueblo in January 1968, it was a Blackbird that helped prevent war. President Johnson was furious at the North Koreans’ brazen act and was seriously considering attacking Pyongyang from the air to force the Koreans to release the ship, but CIA director Richard Helms convinced Johnson to wait until a Blackbird—which could photograph the entire country in under ten minutes, and would be there and gone by the time the North Koreans even knew they’d been filmed—provided better intelligence.

  Johnson agreed. On January 26, a Blackbird flown by CIA pilot Jack Weeks took off from Okinawa and a few hours later had made three passes, photographing the Pueblo in Wonsan harbor. The photos proved the Koreans had the ship, as well as the crew, and made it clear that bombing the area would likely result in American casualties. The president opted to stand down and negotiate. Less than six months later, in June, Weeks was killed when his A-12 malfunctioned during a test flight off the coast of the Philippines. He was one of two CIA pilots killed in crashes during the A-12 program; both are honored by stars on the Memorial Wall in the lobby of CIA Headquarters, in Langley.

  8

  Same Man, Different Mission

  John Parangosky oversaw the Blackbird’s first test flight on April 30, 1962, its operational certification in 1965, and its eventual deployment overseas under the code name Black Shield. “The main objective—to create a reconnaissance aircraft of unprecedented speed, range, and altitude capability—was triumphantly achieved,” Parangosky later said. “It may well be, however, that the most important aspects of the effort lay in its by-products—the notable advances in aerodynamic design, engine performance, cameras, electronic countermeasures, pilot life-support systems, antiair devices, and above all in milling, machining, and shaping titanium.”

  The CIA’s regard for Parangosky was obvious in his appointments. Seemingly every time a major science and technological project arose, the round man with the slicked hair was asked to make sure it worked out, as quickly as possible. The Agency formalized that regard in January 1963, when Herbert Scoville, the deputy director for research, promoted Parangosky to so-called super grade—naming him deputy director for special activities. Even in the internal commendation letter, Scoville was vague about Parangosky’s clandestine work, noting his “great deal of developmental responsibility” with “special projects of the highest national priority.” In particular, Scoville pointed out his “exceptional ability to work with our varied contractors so as to obtain maximum results in a diversity of scientific fields.”

  Between the U-2 and the A-12, Parangosky had been assigned to a very different task devised with the same goal in mind: to capture high-quality photographic intelligence of the Soviet military complex without being detected. The loss of the U-2 in 1960 caused Eisenhower to push for something that could replace it: What he wanted was a spy satellite.

  The Air Force was already working on a photographic reconnaissance satellite, but the progress had been slow, and Eisenhower’s trusted technology advisers, Killian and Land, recommended that the president take the satellite project from the Air Force and hand it to the CIA, which had proven its ability to develop and implement important technology quickly and in secret with the U-2. Ike agreed, and the CIA satellite project was code-named Corona.

  The operation was assigned to Bissell’s Development Projects Staff, and Parangosky, who began the project as its deputy, quickly rose to chief. Once again, Parangosky showed a unique ability to assemble and manage a team that included both government workers and five different private contractors—Itek, Fairchild Camera and Instrument, General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and Lockheed—leading a joint effort that designed and deployed the world’s first photo reconnaissance satellite.

  Launching satellites into space is difficult to do in secret. Corona, then, required a plausible cover story to explain why the United States was sending so many rockets into space and then scrambling to recover things that were dropped back down from the heavens. The answer: Discoverer, a white science program that was allegedly doing biomedical research for future space travel. The story, as far as the public (and the Soviets) knew, was that the Air Force was blasting small animals into space and then recovering them as part of its ongoing research on human space travel.

  There were twelve failed Corona launches between February 28, 1959, and August 10, 1960, when Navy SEALs finally retrieved a “recovery package” from Discoverer 13 after it completed seventeen orbits around the earth. The package fell into the Pacific Ocean, 330 miles northeast of the Hawaiian Islands. It was the first time in history that humanity had launched something into the earth’s orbit and then retrieved it—but the Soviets weren’t far behind. Ten days later, Sputnik 5 blasted off, orbited, and fell back to earth with its two brave pioneers, the space dogs Belka and Strelka—as well as a rabbit, two rats, and forty-two mice—alive and well.

  The Discoverer 13 basket contained no film. Engineers weren’t about to waste an expensive, hand-built camera on a satellite that had yet to work, but once they proved that a satellite could reach orbit, then drop a payload for retrieval, it was time for Corona to go live.

  On August 18, the fourteenth spy satellite blasted off, this time with a KH-1 Keyhole panoramic camera—built by Itek—on board. It reached orbit and began circling the earth. One day, seventeen orbits, and seven passes over the Soviet Union later, the satellite ejected its film-return capsule, which was snatched out of the air over Hawaii during its descent by a C-119 recovery plane.

  The satellite wasn’t just a replacement for the U-2; it was an evolutionary leap in overhead intelligence gathering. That single day of surveillance produced more photo coverage than all of the U-2 flights combined—more than 1 million square miles, albeit with lower resolution.

  The CIA’s science and technology group had solved a tremendous problem, but they weren’t done tinkering. For the next two years, successive versions of the Corona went up and circled Earth, with progressively better cameras. Over that period the Agency methodically honed in on one of the biggest mysteries of the Cold War: Just how large and advanced was the Soviet’s intercontinental ballistic missile program?

  Estimates varied widely, but the prevailing theory among analysts was that the Soviets were dangerously far ahead when it came to ICBMs.

  Those assessments had been wrong. The Corona flights showed that there was little if any missile gap. The United States was in excellent position and might even have had an advantage. Technology prevailed, again.

  • • •

  For the CIA to continue the evolution of this growing branch, which by 1962 had three separate billion-dollar projects under way—in the U-2, Corona, and Oxcart—it needed a distinct home for activities of this kind. In 1963, Killian and Land gave then CIA director John McCone a proposal for “the creation of an organization for research and development which will couple research done outside the intelligence community, both overt and covert, with development and engineering conducted within intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA.”

  They wanted completely new thinking, wherein researchers across the country would share ideas with CIA engineers who could implement them. On August 5, 1963, Albert “Bud” Whee
lon, former director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, assumed leadership of the all-new Directorate of Science and Technology, and over the next few years he helped build arguably the most powerful development and engineering establishment in American history, a government-funded Skunk Works for outlandish projects—like figuring out how to retrieve a submarine wrecked seventeen thousand feet below the ocean’s surface.

  A year before the K-129 sank, John Parangosky was given the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, one of the CIA’s highest awards. When it came time to pick a man to lead the submarine recovery, the choice wasn’t difficult. And the fact that John Parangosky, in early 1969, happened to be between jobs made it even easier.

  A top secret CIA task force assigned to the submarine recovery was formed on July 1, 1969, with Parangosky in charge. Within the Agency, only Carl Duckett knew of the task force’s existence. It was listed in official records only as “Special Projects Staff, DDS&T.”

  9

  Need to Know

  Starting with the U-2, the CIA’s Special Projects Office built and perfected a model for clandestine operations on a massive scale—projects that involved hundreds if not thousands of people, many of them employees of the private sector—and John Parangosky and Walt Lloyd, who helped devise the original security structure for the U-2, played a critical role in all of them.