by Josh Dean
In 1959, Bascom wrote a story about the Mohole for Scientific American, laying out the project’s various goals, sparking a frenzy of press attention, and freaking out certain members of the public, including one crackpot who began sending daily telegraphs to the secretary of the Navy that said “Stop the Mohole!” and stated his fear that drilling a hole in the ocean floor would cause all the water to drain out.
When the NSF formally announced the Mohole Project, Bascom was named technical director. The plan called for refitting the CUSS I to drill in the deep Pacific, and Bascom quickly identified and began working on the single greatest problem: keeping the ship stationary atop an ocean that churns and surges. In a 1959 report, he coined the term “dynamic positioning” for the concept of using four thrusters—essentially giant outboard motors, one at each corner of the ship—to constantly adjust the ship’s location in response to signals from radar buoys positioned around the drill site. An operator monitored radar signals and used a joystick to maneuver the ship back into the center point of the buoy circle whenever the radar told him the ship had shifted out of position.
The actual boring would be done with an industrial drill with a diamond bit at the end of a tapered steel pipe string, but that worked only if the ship could stay relatively still; more than a little motion and the string would snap.
In February 1960, the CUSS I went to sea off San Diego. Two weeks later, a drill bit touched the seafloor in 3,100 feet of water and drilled to 115 feet. “We believe that today’s experiment at a water depth which is nearly an order of magnitude greater than the previous record clearly establishes the feasibility of deep sea drilling,” Bascom wrote in a cable to the National Research Council.
A year later, following modifications to the ship and rig, the CUSS I headed for the deep ocean, off Mexico’s Guadalupe Island. There, on April Fools’ Day 1961, in heavy weather and heaving seas, the CUSS I drilled 560 feet under the seafloor, at which point the drill bit slowed suddenly, indicating that a new layer had been reached. Bascom and the crew nervously waited as the core sample came up with the pipe string and proved to be exactly what everyone thought it would be: basalt. None other than John Steinbeck, Bascom’s friend, was there to report, as the project historian, that “everyone wants a fragment as a memento . . . of the second layer which no one has ever seen before. I asked for a piece and got a scowling refusal so I stole a small piece. And then the damned chief scientist gave me a piece secretly. Made me feel terrible. I had to sneak in and replace the piece I had stolen.”
More holes were drilled, more samples taken, and accolades from the earth sciences community rained down upon the Mohole. “CUSS I’s drilling has about the same emphasis as Columbus’ first feeble voyage of discovery: on this first touching of a new world the way to discovery lies open,” Steinbeck wrote in Life magazine. Even the president took notice. “I have been following with deep interest the experimental drilling in connection with the first phase of Project Mohole,” Kennedy wrote to the president of the NSF. “The success . . . constitutes a remarkable achievement and a historic landmark in our scientific and engineering progress.”
The deep-sea drilling work aboard the CUSS I turned out to be a revelation for Parangosky’s task force, which learned about the Mohole through Bascom’s book A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. In particular, the team was taken with the ship’s ability to maintain position over a specific location within a six-hundred-foot radius, which was accurate enough to avoid any serious damage to the pipe string.
Further investigation revealed that the field of deep-sea drilling had continued after the Mohole. Union Oil funded the spin-off of Global Marine, which had been set up to engineer experimental drillships starting with the CUSS I, and the company took off from there. The Glomar II, built in 1962, was the world’s first drillship built specifically for that purpose from scratch. And by 1968, the year the K-129 sank, Global Marine had refined the drill-ship concept through various evolutions leading up to the Glomar Challenger, their most impressive ship to date. The Challenger was commissioned by the NSF for the Deep Sea Drilling Project and went to sea in 1969. Over the next year, it drilled 1,092 holes at 624 sites, working at depths up to 20,146 feet, in every ocean except the Arctic, and—making penetrations into the seafloor more than three thousand feet deep—recovered ninety-six thousand meters of core.
What really got the Azorian team’s attention was the Challenger’s new, automated dynamic positioning system that enabled the four-hundred-foot ship to maintain station over a specific point within a radius of one hundred feet or less. It was the largest commercial vessel ever outfitted with dynamic positioning, an incredible leap in technology that allowed the ship to basically stand still over a target area, no matter how bad the weather or waves might be. It was also the first commercial ship with satellite navigation. Finally, Global Marine had devised a way to retract the drill string, then lower it back down and continue drilling in the same hole, at depths up to ten thousand feet. To do this, the ship had maintained its position within a circle with a radius of approximately fifteen feet. The Glomar Challenger was a monumental achievement in ocean engineering, a ship that could stand still and take drill samples sixteen thousand feet under the surface of the sea. Earth scientists from all over the world begged to get aboard one of its cruises, and the ship was highly visible, having been featured in numerous science journals and magazines.
As Curtis Crooke later explained it, Global Marine had, by the time of John Parangosky’s surprise visit to his office, “proven our ability to design and operate highly sophisticated vessels, lift and handle heavy work in deep water under adverse conditions in virtually every part of the world.”
This wasn’t just the best company on earth for achieving the CIA’s extremely particular task; it was the only company.
12
The Secret Office of Underwater Spies
Gene Poteat was at his desk in Langley one day that fall when his phone rang and he picked it up to hear a familiar baritone on the other end. It was John Parangosky. The big guy wanted to talk.
Poteat had joined the Agency in 1959 from Bell Labs, where he worked on missile guidance for ICBMs, and he distinguished himself within the Directorate of Science and Technology as a specialist in electronic intelligence, or ELINT as the spies call it. Poteat helped the Agency devise a method for intercepting Soviet missile telemetry, figured out how to locate and test Soviet radar installations using the reflection of their signals off the moon, and created a method for fooling those same radars by flying ghost planes—electronic signals that appeared to radar operators to be actual American jets and were so convincing that the Cuban Air Force scrambled fighters to intercept one such ghost during the 1962 missile crisis.
Poteat’s expertise with radar was why Parangosky recruited him for Oxcart, and the two became good friends over their many months in the Nevada desert. Poteat wasn’t cleared into Azorian, but he’d heard enough chatter to know that something was up. Fifteen minutes later, Parangosky barreled into his office before a secretary could announce him and sat down in a chair opposite Poteat’s desk.
“It looks like we’re going to have to create an office similar to the NRO,” he said, referring to the National Reconnaissance Office, a joint Air Force–CIA organization set up inside the Pentagon to coordinate activities for overhead surveillance after the U-2 and Corona programs created a sudden boom in photo intelligence. Poteat had helped design the agency and was the first man assigned to the NRO after it was officially formed.
The “boat project,” as Parangosky called it, was necessitating a similar partnership between the Agency and the Navy. “So tell me how in the hell that thing was organized.”
Poteat laughed. “You mean the fighting and struggles?”
“Well, yeah,” Parangosky said. “It’s not a lot different now. Only instead of with an Air Force, it’s with a Navy.”
Once David Packa
rd decided that the submarine recovery project should go to the CIA, a process was initiated to build an extremely small but powerful and well-provisioned support structure to facilitate the Agency on the project, while also keeping the Navy involved with major decisions. Parangosky was handed the job of figuring out what that might look like.
Poteat gave his old friend an organizational diagram for how the NRO was formed, and Parangosky used it as a model for setting up the Navy–CIA office that would oversee Azorian. That office would be known to the very few who were even aware of it as the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, or NURO—a group so secret that its existence wasn’t officially acknowledged for decades.
• • •
On August 8, 1969, Carl Duckett outlined the framework for NURO to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, better known as ExCom, a small, shadowy advisory group formed by Kennedy in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which met whenever a major foreign policy decision was at hand.
The organization the Agency was proposing, Duckett explained, would be based on the model of the NRO, which had been successful in its mission of overseeing and distributing intelligence gathered by aerial surveillance. The submarine recovery would be NURO’s first program, but the idea was that other underwater espionage operations would surely follow, particularly if this was successful, and NURO could shepherd those, too.
ExCom approved the establishment of the new organization, as well as the allocation of resources and personnel, and agreed that the president should be told. Kissinger shared the plan with Nixon, who approved, and on August 19, 1969, NURO’s creation was formalized, with the dictate that its operations should include the best talent available from the Navy and the CIA.
The Agency had learned many things from its early experiences with planes and satellites, especially that tension with the military is inevitable. Top brass at the Air Force were angry from the onset that the CIA was put in charge of the U-2, Oxcart, and Corona programs—all of them high-tech flying objects—and the Agency helped lessen that friction by putting an Air Force man in charge of the NRO, with a CIA employee as his deputy. It was an org-chart decision as much as a hierarchical one, since in reality the chief and deputy worked side by side, as near equals, but rank means everything to the military, and the move was a persuasive symbol.
So that’s what they did with NURO, too. Robert Frosch, the Navy’s assistant secretary for research and development, was named founding staff director, with Ernest “Zeke” Zellmer, a World War II submariner who’d been working in management for the S&T, as his deputy.
The new program was based on the fifth floor of the Pentagon and was not included in official Defense Department records or organization charts. Anyone who walked by the office entrance would have no idea what lay behind its unmarked doors.
Primarily, NURO’s job was to appropriate and manage the money for underwater projects—in particular, those involving the “special project subs” like Halibut—but having senior Navy staff alongside S&T managers was also meant to facilitate coordination, so that if Parangosky’s team needed some specific naval expertise or the use of a ship, there was a system in place to make that happen.
Frosch was a theoretical physicist from the Bronx who climbed the Navy ranks through the Office of Naval Research, where he helped develop active sonar. He moved into nuclear test detection at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) before rejoining the Navy in 1966 to oversee all research. He was a bright man, well-liked by his underlings, and he really embraced his role at NURO, as the head of a secret office that existed basically off the books, nearly always arriving late to meetings, after everyone was seated, with a lit cigar in his mouth.
Zeke Zellmer was an excellent counterbalance to his more flamboyant boss. He’d gone to war in the Pacific as a communications officer aboard the submarine USS Cavalla, commissioned on February 29, 1944, making her a rare leap-year sub, which the boat’s CO considered to be a lucky omen.
After the war, Zellmer spent three years in his hometown of St. Louis, working for Washington University, and then was recruited by the Agency to study Soviet submarines and other naval vessels. Eventually—after numerous assignments, and a four-year stint at the National Security Agency—Zellmer came back to Langley to join the staff of Bud Wheelon’s brand-new DDS&T, where he was given directorship of the weapons and equipment division. It was in this capacity that he first met John Parangosky.
Zellmer’s cover at the Pentagon was as special assistant to Frosch, and that’s how you’d find him in the building’s phone book. He had a staff to keep activities coordinated and, most important, to keep the money coming. And they were going to need lots of money.
As a former Navy man who had established himself at the CIA, Zellmer was an ideal fit at NURO, possessing an ease and comfort in working with either organization. No quality was more important, though, than his ability to work with Parangosky.
Zellmer liked Parangosky but was never confident in his ability to read the man. Even in a realm filled with workaholics, Zellmer marveled at Parangosky’s singular obsession with work. He appeared to have no life outside of the Agency and wasn’t at all upset about that fact.
• • •
From the outset, Azorian was given the highest possible security protocols. Even within the DDS&T and Naval Intelligence branches, only those who absolutely needed to know about it would be cleared and given details. Parangosky and his security chief, Paul Evans, built a new security system, code-named Jennifer, which set very specific parameters for the handling of information. The name Jennifer appeared on the cover of every file exchanged and became so common that it was soon almost synonymous with the operation.
Jennifer was also designed to protect the methods from the intelligence gathered—the “take,” as it was known. The Agency established a security protocol during the U-2 program specifically to deal with the matter of intelligence distribution. The program itself needed to remain highly classified, but the products of those flights—the pictures, and the results of analysis by photo interpreters—were of value to many people and departments. It was logistically impossible for CIA security officers to be responsible for deciding who could be trusted with the intel, so to remove that overwhelming responsibility the group created a system to separate the data from its origins. That system would have a code name. Certain valuable pieces of intelligence might show up at Air Force, or State, or the NSA, and they would be stamped with that code word but would include no other information about its origins. You didn’t ask where the photo or telemetry data came from. You just worried about what you could do with it.
If the Azorian’s mission were successful, there might be code books to distribute, as well as ballistic missile guidance information, or maybe valuable insights into Soviet construction.
The moniker for Azorian’s intel haul has a sad origin story. It was chosen as a tribute to Paul Evans’ young daughter, who, according to Dave Sharp, “had recently and tragically died.” The so-called Jennifer control system for classified documents was named in her honor.
13
Global Marine to the Rescue
NOVEMBER 1969
Within a week of ambushing Curtis Crooke in his office, Big John Parangosky hired Global Marine to do some preliminary engineering on the boat project. To disguise the contract and expedite the work, he used an intermediary company named Mechanics Research Inc. (MRI), the same one he’d selected to provide technical assistance for his task force. MRI was an aerospace contractor that had been doing work for the CIA for years and had in place an infrastructure for secure communications as well as a cleared office space in the Tishman Building on Century Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport. MRI also had an existing contract with the CIA that included a team of cleared workers who were free to subcontract to others, when it seemed fortuitous to keep a level of separation in place. MRI’s locati
on was strategic, as well. The Agency’s Los Angeles base for the Services and Support Group of the DDS&T—known as the Western Industrial Liaison Detachment, or WILD—was located in the basement of the Tishman Building.
For this early work on a proof of concept, Crooke was asked to keep a low profile. He pulled in just two men, both engineers from the oil industry: Jimmy Dean, hired away from Mobil Oil following work on the CUSS I, and Jack Reed, a structural and petroleum engineer who’d previously worked at Humble Oil. Not even Global Marine’s CEO, Bob Bauer, was told what they were doing. Bauer trusted Crooke, who ran a division of experimental projects, and didn’t need to know all of the details of a prospective job, especially if Crooke told him that he wasn’t yet at liberty to discuss them. In due time, if things worked out, all would be revealed.
The three men were given a windowless room accessed by double doors secured by cipher locks inside MRI’s cluster of offices. This was new territory for Global Marine, and the message was very clear: What happened inside that room stayed inside the room, unless the Agency said otherwise.
Parangosky gave Crooke what he called “the green book,” a collection of about a dozen concepts proposed by CIA engineers for how one might raise a submarine off the ocean floor. The book contained all of the task force’s ideas, outlandish or otherwise, as well as Craven and Bradley’s original Navy plan, which suggested using robots to access the sub’s interior.
It took very little time for Crooke, Dean, and Reed to shoot down nearly all of the ideas in the green book. The only way the Agency was going to get that sub up from the bottom—if such a thing were even possible—was by using the “brute-strength” or “dead lift” method. They would have to pull it up on the end of a string of pipe, the longest and heaviest ever built.
MRI was as secure as any contractor facility could be, but Crooke and his men had no experience with secure communications, and Parangosky didn’t want to take any risks, especially in the tenuous early days of an operation that didn’t yet have official approval from the White House. Phone calls were brief and very general. No specific names or details were to be discussed. When it was time to go over design specifics, Parangosky wanted Crooke to deliver his findings in person to his engineers on the East Coast, in surroundings they controlled.