The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  A few weeks into the project, Crooke and Dean ran out for lunch across Sepulveda, one of the major north-south thoroughfares near LAX, and on the way back Dean misjudged the traffic and was struck by a US Postal Service truck. He was only bruised, fortunately, and when Paul Evans heard the story he explained how fortunate they all were that Dean hadn’t been injured enough to require surgery. No one knew yet how trustworthy Dean was, and it’s not uncommon for people under anesthesia to blab uncontrollably, so a recently cleared contractor with an unproven track record going under for surgery is a security man’s nightmare. Who knew what Dean might have said under the influence of gas?

  Ultimately, the CIA briefed and cleared Global’s lawyer, Taylor Hancock, Bob Bauer, and A. J. Field, all of whom endorsed the project, as devoted patriots as well as businessmen who realized that this was going to be a large and lucrative job for GMI.

  To move forward with the design, though, Crooke needed additional brainpower, so he asked Parangosky to clear more Global Marine engineers. He knew that the kind of pipe string the operation was going to require could be deployed only from a massive ship, the kind of floating island Global had begun building for its deep-sea drilling, and it wasn’t just as easy as designing a giant ship.

  That ship would have to be unlike anything ever built, and on top of that, it had to make narrative sense to the world—especially to the Soviets, who would be paying attention to any unusual activity in the Pacific. One of the first Global men cleared to join the effort was Russ Thornburg, vice president of Oceanics, or what Crooke liked to call OTO—for “other than oil.”

  Thornburg and Crooke set upon the challenge of explaining why a giant ship would be operating at a standstill in a remote area of the Pacific. What reason could a ship plausibly have for being parked out there? Pretending the ship is crippled buys only a few days, maybe a week. And it wasn’t like other ships wouldn’t come to help. Considering weather delays, rough seas, and technical problems, a mission to lift the sub could take weeks or even months. To Thornburg, the answer was obvious: Global Marine was going into the mining business.

  14

  Ocean Mining 101

  Pretending to mine the ocean floor wasn’t some crazy idea that came out of nowhere. By the late 1960s, deep-ocean mining was widely discussed in the marine industry press, and some of Global Marine’s competitors were also exploring how harvesting minerals from the seafloor might be done. The technological hurdles were extreme, but the potential payoff was enormous: billions of tons of variously sized manganese nodules, which, depending on their location around the planet, contained a mix of valuable rare earth elements, including copper, nickel, and cobalt.

  Nodules were first identified by John Young Buchanan, the staff chemist on the scientific voyage of the HMS Challenger, a British vessel that sailed the oceans from 1872 to 1876, covering seventy thousand nautical miles in the hopes of opening up the mysteries of what lay under the sea. Buchanan discovered many things in the buckets attached to hemp rope that the ship used for dredging, including life on a seabed that was thought to be frozen, as well as lumpy gray nodules he recognized to be an almost pure oxide of manganese. The nodules, his expedition leader noted, ranged in size from mustard seed to cricket ball and were formed like pearls inside of oysters—minerals precipitating out of the sea and solidifying around a solid nucleus that could be almost anything. Often, the Challenger observed, it was “a bit of volcanic glass, a shark’s tooth, or the ear bone of a whale for a nucleus,” but it could even be a grain of sand. The average nodule was about three centimeters in diameter, but because the objects grow in perpetuity, they can reach giant size. One manganese boulder found “entangled in a telephone cable” that was being salvaged near the Philippines weighed eighteen hundred pounds.

  These dull, lumpy objects were found in all of the world’s oceans, but the largest and best concentration was in the Pacific, especially in a large area south and west of Hawaii, where studies found an average of eleven kilograms of nodules per square meter of seafloor. Nodules have an “exceedingly slow rate of accumulation,” growing in size by just one millimeter every thousand years, but their spread is so vast—there is a mind-blowingly large amount of seafloor on earth—that the total growth in volume over a year is 6 million metric tons, which makes them, essentially, an infinitely renewable resource. The best estimate on the total tonnage in the Pacific alone, as of 1969, was 1.66 × 1012 metric tons.

  In 1963, the oceanographer John Mero turned his PhD thesis into the book The Mineral Resources of the Sea, and most experts cite it as the birth of the notion that the seabed was a location that could be mined commercially. Manganese nodules in particular were singled out. “From an economic standpoint,” Mero writes, “they are the most important sediment of the deep-sea floor.”

  Mero’s book inspired groups to organize research voyages into the world’s oceans to begin sampling nodules. And Global Marine, in 1968, listed ocean mining as one of several areas of future growth for the company in its annual report, written before Crooke ever met Parangosky. The company’s Engineering and Construction Division, it noted, had already developed “specialized equipment” to investigate occurrences of valuable minerals, including manganese and phosphorite, on the seafloor.

  Initial studies estimated the start-up cost of a deep-sea-mining operation, plus processing facilities, at between 30 million and 300 million dollars. Even then, according to a 1969 report by the US Army School of Naval Warfare, “a manganese mining operation in the deep ocean is possible and could be economically feasible.”

  There was, if not immediately then at least in the long term, both an economic and a national security rationale for pursuing ocean-mining technology. Copper and manganese were both fairly plentiful in 1969, but the United States had only minimal deposits of either—95 percent of manganese and 92 percent of copper used in the United States came from foreign sources—and to find its own domestic supplies of these and other import-dependent resources was always in America’s best interests. Mero predicted that within two decades “the entire free-world copper supply will come from the sea, radically changing the balance of world trade.”

  The challenges in harvesting these minerals, however, were significant. Designing and building a system to do the physical mining—locating and retrieving the nodules in enough volume to justify the cost of the machines being used—was a massive task. And only half of the problem. The nodules are a conglomerate consisting of multiple elements smashed together with other materials that have no value. To get at whatever you actually want—nickel, cobalt, or copper—you have to process them, and as of 1969, no one had yet devised a way to do that.

  People were thinking about it, though. In November 1968, the oil and natural gas company Tenneco formed Deepsea Ventures. The company built a 152-foot research vessel and announced a plan to invest from 100 million to 150 million dollars in an ocean-mining program, including a “prototype noncommercial mining operation” in shallow water off the coast of Florida, as well as a mini pilot plant to demonstrate how the company would process the nodules. When the first test was conducted successfully in the summer of 1970, wire reports carried the story across the country. They quoted Deepsea’s marketing director, James Victory, as saying the deposits held enough copper “to rewire the whole damn country.”

  Americans weren’t alone in wondering how humanity might tap the seafloor. The Germans and Japanese had projects to explore ocean mining, and while the Russians had yet to launch any kind of mining experiment, they were actively studying the distribution of nodules around the central Pacific, including locations in the general area of the K-129 wreck.

  Concerns about exploiting areas of the globe that belonged to no country became an inflection point at the UN, where landlocked nations began to agitate for a treaty that would ensure that all countries benefited equally from whatever was harvested from the seafloor.

  On May 3,
1970, Richard Nixon stepped into the conversation. “The nations of the world are now facing decisions of momentous importance to man’s use of the oceans for decades ahead,” he said in a formal statement about the United States’ National Ocean Policy. “The stark fact is that the law of the sea is inadequate to meet the needs of modern technology and the concerns of the international community.”

  It was time, Nixon said, for all nations of the world to establish some basic standards about shared use of the oceans, and he called upon the United States to move this effort forward.

  Tension on the subject had been building for years at that point. In September 1967, the Maltese ambassador to the UN delivered a three-hour speech to the General Assembly in reaction to fears that the United States and Soviet Union might soon place nuclear weapons on the bottom of the sea. The deep ocean and its vast mineral wealth, he said, should be “the common heritage of mankind.” And three years later, in 1970, the UN formally adopted that idea.

  15

  Every Great Ship Has a Great Naval Architect

  SUMMER–FALL 1970

  Once the CIA and Global Marine had a plausible story, they needed a ship. And the man to conceive of such a vessel was obviously John Graham. Graham, then fifty-five, was Global’s chief naval architect, a brilliant, confident redhead who had designed all of the company’s breakthrough ships, including the Glomar Challenger, which had so impressed Parangosky’s task force.

  Graham joined Global Marine in 1958 after relocating to California from Houston with his wife, Nell, and three children. He hadn’t moved west for career reasons. Graham was running from his demons. He was an MIT graduate from a proud family. His father had been an engineer, too, until he was named chief justice for the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals by presidential appointment. Graham’s father was also an amateur archaeologist who would take his son digging along the Potomac River, where they’d find arrowheads, as well as pieces of old ships that had wrecked in the rapids outside Washington. Father and son studied up on these wrecks and then built models to re-create them, and Graham went off to college with the idea that he would like to build ships, for real, as a job. At MIT, he married the secretary of the school president and specialized in naval architecture and marine engineering. He didn’t actually like sailing, or even being in the water. He just liked building boats.

  After college, John and Nell Graham moved to Long Island, where he worked and thrived at one of the largest shipyards in the area, establishing a reputation as a clever engineer who knew how to do big jobs on time, within a budget. The Grahams raised their children on a dead-end street where twenty-eight kids lived on a single block. His career took him to New Jersey, and then to Houston, with each destination bringing a better job and a bigger house. In Houston, Graham went into business with a friend, founding a naval architecture firm called Graham and Christensen. He was a serious man, rarely easygoing, and as his workload intensified, the only way Graham seemed to know how to relax was by drinking, a longtime habit that escalated and then finally spun out of control in Texas.

  There were cocktails at lunch, cocktails after work, and then, at home, Graham would drink beer from cans that piled up around his chair until he fell asleep. It began to affect his work, and Graham’s partner ultimately kicked him out of the business, an event that he failed to mention to his family until his young daughter Jenny came home after school and found her dad passed out in bed in the middle of the afternoon.

  That was enough for Nell. Her father had just died, suddenly, of a heart attack in California, and she told John that she and the kids were moving west to help her mother.

  Graham absorbed the news that his family was leaving him and asked Nell for one more chance. She gave it to him, with the caveat that she was still moving to California. If he wanted to save the family and make it work, he’d have to come along.

  “I will sober up and we’ll start again,” he said.

  Nell and the kids piled into the family car with the dog and cat and a trunk full of luggage and headed for Newport Beach. John Graham caught a flight to Long Beach and checked himself into rehab. A month later, his soul and spirit revived, he was discharged and went immediately to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He never drank again.

  John Graham became a fervent member of the Southern California AA community. He attended two meetings a day and devoted much of his free time to helping other alcoholics in trouble. The men of AA became his best friends. He took up golf, rediscovered the saxophone, and took a job as a draftsman, a job far beneath his abilities, but which reconnected him to his love of shipbuilding. Quickly, his talents stood out, and he began consulting, in particular to the famous Todd Shipyards, in San Pedro. Then, one day in 1960, he saw an ad for a position overseeing all naval architecture for a company called Global Marine.

  The interview was at Global’s headquarters in downtown LA, and Graham’s credentials—an MIT grad with extensive experience building ships—made him an attractive candidate. At the interview, Global Marine’s three top executives, President Bob Bauer, VP A. J. Field, and Curtis Crooke, were impressed by the man. Graham made it clear that this was his dream job, that he’d basically been born, reared, and trained to build the kinds of ships Global needed, but he wanted the men to know the whole story before they considered his candidacy.

  “There’s one thing you need to know about me,” Graham told the men. “I’m a drunk. And I’ve been a drunk for a long time. If I can keep sober I will give you the best years of my life.”

  He got the job. And Global Marine took off.

  • • •

  Crooke knew that Project Azorian couldn’t succeed without Graham. Global Marine was acclaimed for innovation, and that innovation almost always began in the brain of the company’s chief architect. The drinking, however, created a quandary. The idea of putting a reformed alcoholic in charge of engineering on the largest operation in CIA history gave John Parangosky and his security staff serious concerns. It was basically a nonstarter.

  The most important factor in clearing an individual for a covert operation—especially one as sensitive as Azorian—was the likelihood that the person could compromise the project. And an alcohol or drug problem, even a former problem, was among the behaviors most feared by CIA security personnel. Dark secrets can be exploited. And drinkers often relapse. On the other hand, Crooke made it very clear that Global couldn’t pull this off without John Graham, and he staked his word on the company’s best engineer. He asked Parangosky to do whatever was necessary to get Graham cleared. While not impossible, Parangosky explained, it was going to take time. And work on Azorian couldn’t just freeze.

  While he waited for the CIA to figure out a way to get Graham cleared, Crooke brought the project to his chief architect under its white cover, telling Graham that the company had an anonymous client who was exploring the possibility of deep-ocean mining. This wasn’t an outrageous story to tell. Global had now proven it could build huge ships equipped with station keeping that could operate on the ocean floor, and the subject of ocean mining was bubbling up all over the industry. If there was money to be made there, why wouldn’t Global Marine at least pursue concepts? So what, Crooke asked his head naval architect, would a mining ship even look like?

  Graham’s first reaction was that Crooke was nuts. Sure, he could design a ship that would sit in place and deploy a long pipe that sucked up rocks from the bottom of the ocean, but such a ship would be prohibitively expensive. You’d have to operate it for years just to break even. And the point of Global Marine was to make profits, so that would be stupid. Crooke told Graham not to worry, that he already had potential partners willing to share in the cost. Global’s risk was small. He just needed a ship.

  To work at Global Marine in 1970 was to be employed at a company that could do no wrong, where resources and intellectual energy seemed almost limitless and the drive to innovate and explore in an ind
ustry that didn’t even exist before 1961 created an atmosphere of relentless optimism. Led by Crooke and Graham, Global Marine’s engineers just kept thinking bigger and bigger, and though they knew eventually they’d run afoul of the laws of physics, they fully intended to push the boundaries of what was possible in the deep ocean until they reached that point.

  Graham was an intuitive engineer who worked from his gut and Crooke knew how to set him free to create, by not drilling down on detail. Graham’s concepts were almost always right, and Crooke surrounded him with technical engineers to refine the detail. But on this job, with its epic scale and frantic schedule, there was little time for noodling over detail anyway. They weren’t designing a prototype for future mining ships. Every system on Azorian’s ship could and should be purpose-built only for this mission.

  When Crooke brought him the mining concept, Graham called in a few of his closest engineers and began to sketch out a ship. His loyal secretary, Laura Crouchet, protected his schedule and office, keeping him provisioned with cigarettes—which he smoked often and enthusiastically—and coffee, which he consumed by the gallon. Crooke told Graham to keep the early design work quiet, at least from upper management. If he needed to call in a little help, that was okay, but it would be best to keep it all low-key. One of Graham’s first recruits was his least-experienced naval architect, a recent University of Michigan graduate named Charlie Canby, whom he liked for his youthful enthusiasm and unpredictable nature.