by Josh Dean
Graham asked Canby, who’d yet to design anything of note, to “draw some lines of a Glomar Grand Isle–class ship.” This was Global Marine’s largest class—more than four hundred feet in length and weighing at least eleven thousand tons—the same size and type of ship as the Challenger. Like all of Global’s new drillships, it also needed to have automated pipe handling and a hydrophone-enabled station-keeping system.
Graham was asking for something even bigger, though. He wanted thirty-five thousand tons of displacement and a cavernous opening inside the ship—a feature known as a moon pool—that was 125 feet long by 50 feet wide.
Canby loved to visit Graham’s office. The boss was often tough but always encouraging. He’d accept the latest drawings, slap them on his desk, and then take the old dime-store slide rule, the kind, Canby says, “they give you in sixth grade,” out of his shirt pocket. Most naval architects had a favorite slide rule, a showpiece, maybe made of bamboo and accented with ivory, but Graham’s was cheap and plastic. He’d slide it back and forth across whatever print was on his desk, whipping from line to line like an architect in a film that was being fast-forwarded, pausing periodically to tap along to the beat of whatever big-band classic was playing on his office stereo. Almost inevitably, if he took some prints home to study, they’d come back splattered with red pencil marks and coffee rings.
Graham liked what Canby was doing, but he couldn’t make up his mind, either. He kept increasing the size of the moon pool as the specs passed on by Crooke—who was getting them from Parangosky back in Virginia—changed. The ship’s gaping center cavity went from 125 by 50 feet to 175 by 65 feet to 199 by 75 feet, on a ship with a displacement of sixty-five thousand tons—a set of specs unlike any Canby had ever seen and very odd dimensions for a mining ship, which he might have noticed had he not been twenty-one and thrilled simply to be designing ships alongside John Graham.
Graham was always the smartest person in the meeting, a man who didn’t equivocate and who inspired awe in his employees. One of his best qualities as an employee and a collaborator was that he rarely said no, at least not right away. He never reflexively said an idea wasn’t possible, even if he believed that was the case. In his office, all ideas were entertained, and the architect never dismissed one until he’d done some scribbling on a napkin to test it out first.
Gradually, the team assigned to what had become known as the “Deep Ocean Mining Ship” expanded. Graham pulled in the best of what he called, endearingly, his “grunt engineers,” including Sherman Wetmore, a prodigy who had worked for Global Marine since 1961, when he graduated from college. Wetmore was involved as design engineer on all of the important drillships, including Glomar II, III, IV, and V and the Challenger. Graham also drafted the mechanical engineers Jim McNary, Abe Person, and Charlie Johnson to work on ship and “mining” support systems.
In fairly short order, the group had designed a mining ship that, they thought, could do the work to fulfill the bizarre and increasingly onerous specs that Crooke was feeding them. In addition to being enormous—more than six hundred feet—with a moon pool the size of a college gymnasium, it would have dynamic positioning, a semiautomated pipe-handling system, and a set of sliding doors in the bottom of the hull through which seventeen thousand feet of steel pipe could be lowered and raised by the largest and most powerful heavy-lift system ever built—deployed from a rig floor atop a gimbaled A-frame derrick that could stay perfectly still even as the ship itself pitched in rough seas. The only thing missing was a mining machine—whatever was going to be on the end of the pipe to locate and suck in nodules. But that wasn’t John Graham’s responsibility. Lockheed Corporation had been hired to handle that part.
• • •
Eventually, Graham got his clearance—Parangosky had worked around the drinking issues—and when Crooke briefed him on the ship’s true purpose, Graham stared a hole through him. “I knew there was something screwy about this whole thing,” he said.
The design was constantly evolving, but as soon as Graham and Crooke felt that it was far enough along to share with the Agency’s engineering group, Paul Evans’ security team arranged a trip to Washington and booked the two nautical wonks into a hotel in Fairfax County as senior executives from Graham Pharmaceuticals.
When they arrived at the hotel and checked in, Graham as CEO and Crooke as vice president, the two men were asked to fill out a card with their work details and contact information. The clerk laid two cards out and then stepped away as Graham and Crooke began to fill them out and then stopped at the same point. They looked at each other, whispered, and then couldn’t contain their amusement, doubling over in a convulsion of laughter at the same realization: Neither of them knew how to spell “pharmaceuticals.”
It didn’t take long, at most a few meetings, for Crooke to recognize that Parangosky and Graham were best kept apart. Graham was at heart a friendly guy, even loose around those he trusted, but the engineer stiffened reflexively when he felt uncomfortable. He was a tall guy who stood erect, and he entered every meeting with an aura of the man in charge. If you didn’t know Graham, he could come off as curt or standoffish, and Parangosky wasn’t the warmest individual in the workplace, either. He was, in every sense of the word, professional, with little time for politics or negotiating around prickly personalities. Fortunately, there wasn’t much reason for them to interact. Graham attended briefings, but it was Crooke who ran them.
• • •
Once the decision was made to pursue the “grunt lift” concept, with Global Marine as chief contractor, concern among the CIA’s engineers focused mostly on the pipe. What would happen if the pipe broke while the string was under maximum stress, turning a relatively static 17-million-pound load into a dynamic one? The answer, according to a nuclear physicist who sat in on one of the advisory meetings, was that the broken pipe would become a runaway spring, with “the energy equivalent of setting off a nuclear explosive of 8 kilotons.”
This and other horrifying potential outcomes were not enough to deter Parangosky, NURO director Bob Frosch, or David Packard. Parangosky trusted that his task force, when given access to real-world experts who built ships and pipes, could solve these problems. He also knew there just wasn’t time to fret. There were perishable aspects to Azorian, both tangible and otherwise. Certain things on the seafloor—paper documents, such as the battle orders, and the cryptographic machines, likely made of weaker metals—would decay, in time. And the bigger risk was secrecy. To pull this off would require a massive operation, involving hundreds or more likely thousands of people, and keeping a program of that scale hidden from the Soviets would be hard. Especially if it dragged on for years. And then there was the matter of the location. The area where the sub went down was notoriously rough, and there was only a brief two-month window during the summer when a ship might be able to sit on station in relative calm. If Parangosky’s team missed that date, they’d have to wait a year, so that a delay of even two months somewhere late in the design would likely result in the loss of twelve months in real time. That would pile up more costs and allow more time for a leak.
The only way to do this was to do it. So in October 1970, Parangosky was given the okay to begin design and construction of the major hardware components simultaneously despite the fact that his task force had identified eleven “major unknowns or technical risk areas.” These included such “basic items as the exact dimension and condition of the target, the ship design, the working machinery to provide the lift capability, and the pipe string.” Allowing four to eight months for study and analysis of each component—as a real-world engineering environment might require—would add three or four years to a program that needed to start as soon as possible to have even a slight chance of success. Everyone understood that the designs would need to be flexible enough to accommodate changes that might be necessary during the construction.
If this sounds like a ridiculous set o
f parameters, that’s because it was.
16
Big Bertha
FALL 1970
The plan would require four primary pieces: First, an enormous ship built around a moon pool large enough to hold the wrecked sub, with sliding gates in the hull’s bottom that could open and close to lower the string, retrieve the sub, and then pull the sub inside without anyone on the surface knowing that it had been done. Second, a mechanical grabber or claw at the end of the drill string to grab and hold the sub while it was raised. Third, the pipe-string system, which would be the largest and toughest ever built. And finally, a submersible barge/dry dock that would serve two purposes. It would need to be large enough that the claw could be built inside, out of view. Once the claw was completed inside the barge, the barge itself, with the claw inside, would be put into the water and sailed out to sea to mate with the ship.
No one company could possibly handle all of the major systems, nor would Parangosky’s ambitious schedule allow such a thing, so the work was divided up, with Global Marine building the ship, Lockheed Missiles and Space handling the claw and the barge, and Summa/Hughes Tool Company making the pipe string. Global Marine would also be the primary contractor, coordinating the program office and the various subcontractors.
And there were many. Aside from the three primary contractors, Parangosky’s task force selected numerous others to contribute specific components, including Western Gear to build the heavy-lift system and Honeywell to handle data processing, which included the automatic station keeping that would enable the ship to hold its position over a fixed location.
The project was a race from the outset. Work needed to begin as quickly as possible, even in some cases before there was official approval in Washington. Once bases had been established on both coasts, the CIA would install ciphered phones so that officers on the two coasts could communicate by voice without fear of being overheard. But that would take time, and the CIA task force needed to be in regular contact with Global Marine, MRI, and the other West Coast contractors. There was no reason to suspect leaks at this point, but Parangosky still insisted on the strictest precautions. Until encrypted phone lines were installed, anyone in Washington who wanted to call Curtis Crooke or John Graham had to go outside and use one of dozens of phone booths around Fairfax County that the Agency had identified as safe for use. Known officers were also forbidden from meeting publicly with any of the contractors or even entering their headquarters unless they’d been scrubbed by security officers and given disguises. If an engineer did need to travel—say, to Seattle to visit Honeywell—it had to be under a false name and with a nonrelatable, nonproject explanation for his presence.
• • •
John Graham determined a rough blueprint for a ship that he thought could handle the load and then assigned architects to focus on specific functions. A young architect named Chuck Cannon was assigned to design the hull, which included the sliding moon-pool gates in the bottom that would open and close to allow the capture vehicle—and, hopefully, the submarine— to come in and out of the ship without detection.
Something that troubled Graham from the moment the ship’s lines were drawn was how having such a large hole in the middle—and the extremely long, relatively narrow wing walls on either side of that hole—would affect the ship’s structure and stability at sea. Even after Global Marine began to submit its drawings to the American Bureau of Shipping for approval, Graham asked Cannon to perform manual calculations to predict how the ship would react structurally in a seaway. It took Cannon three weeks, but he determined that the ship would undergo stresses at acceptable levels even in fairly heavy wave conditions. But not everything was predictable; certain factors would be unknowns even after the ship was finished.
Cannon was thrilled by the responsibility, but also intimidated, which typified his experience under Graham. Shortly after he was hired, at age twenty-three, Cannon was ordered to fly to New York and read a paper (that Graham had written but was too busy to deliver himself) to the national Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME). The paper was a critique of a SNAME technical paper titled “Vehicles for Ocean Engineering,” and it was withering. These meetings were known to be polite and complimentary, but after a trembling Cannon finished the paper, he looked out at a “stunned” room that, he later recalled, “was pin-drop quiet.”
He was still a little shaken when he returned to LA and reported back to Graham, who patted him on the shoulder, smiled, and fired up a cigarette.
• • •
The mining ship that began to emerge on Graham’s drafting table was like none ever built, a massive vessel sturdy enough to pick up 3.92 million pounds—the equivalent of a World War II destroyer—from the bottom of the ocean, lift it more than three miles, and then carry it home in the ship’s belly, without anyone seeing it. This required a very clever design, and Graham was free to try basically anything without worrying about revealing the ship’s true purpose, since no one had ever built a mining ship before. A mining ship could look like whatever Graham wanted.
There were certain necessities, of course. The ship would need berthing for more than one hundred men, many of whom weren’t experienced seamen and who, being away from home for a month or more, would need some legitimate comforts in order not to lose their minds. And it would have to withstand some of the most punishing weather and ocean conditions imaginable. While under way, that could be storms with one-hundred-foot waves, winds reaching one hundred knots or more, and temperatures that ranged wildly, from 40 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The Agency task force had compiled a list of these ridiculous requirements, which Graham tacked on a wall over his desk and often fixated on while chain-smoking his way through a problem.
To meet the program’s rigid deadlines, materials had to be ordered before designs were finalized. Long lead procurement began in March 1971, starting with the biggest pieces of steel, such as the ones required for the hull, the ship’s center well, the A-frame derrick, the gimbal platforms, the gimbal bearings, and the enormous five-foot-diameter by twenty-foot-long heave-compensation and heavy-lift system cylinders, which would take fifteen to eighteen months to manufacture.
Curtis Crooke left Graham mostly alone to do his work, but he also knew his chief architect better than anyone. The two had been working together for twelve years, on one massive project after another. Crooke recognized Graham as a genius, but not a perfectionist, and considering the pace at which Azorian had to come together, he needed to be sure time wasn’t wasted on ideas that weren’t going to work. So Crooke assigned a human safeguard, a quiet, sharply dressed, obsessively detail-oriented engineer named Dayton Knorr, to watch over his chief architect’s shoulder and check his math. Graham was the kind of engineer who solved problems on the fly, who “did his work on the back of matchboxes,” as Crooke liked to say. Knorr’s job was to be Graham’s shadow, to stay quiet and make sure the technology required to build whatever he was proposing actually existed, or would soon.
17
Paging Howard Hughes
The mining cover struck everyone as perfect, but it had one flaw. Global Marine wasn’t big enough to plausibly go into such an expensive and speculative business on its own. No one would believe it. And because Global was a public corporation, Curtis Crooke needed a way to explain to investors why this drilling company would embark on such an experimental concept, not to mention how it was going to finance the hiring of the contractors required to help bring it to fruition. The money had to come from somewhere—ideally from a “client” who could hire Global Marine to do the work.
Nearly all of the companies large enough to plausibly pay for such a venture were publicly traded, and the CIA wasn’t about to drag in a public corporation, which would then have to explain to its shareholders why it was paying hundreds of millions of dollars to hire Global Marine to start a new industry that was speculative at best. That presented too much risk.
There was, however, one company that made sense: Howard Hughes’s Hughes Tool Company. The true origin of the idea remains a mystery. CIA engineers, including Dave Sharp, recall that it came from inside Parangosky’s task force and was fairly obvious when they made a list of companies that fit the extremely narrow criteria of (a) being large enough to actually launch a mining venture, and (b) already operating in a business space where embarking on such a venture would make sense to the public, the media, and the Soviets. Curtis Crooke is sure that it was his idea. In either case, the only real option turned out to be the perfect choice.
Hughes Tool was a private corporation that didn’t have to explain its activities to investors. Even better, it was a private company owned by a reclusive billionaire industrialist who was famous for investing in risky ventures and had no apparent concern for his public image. Hughes was sixty-four years old and a virtual ghost at this point in his life. The once brash pilot, film producer, airplane maker, and real estate investor was now profoundly paranoid, addicted to prescription opiates, and germophobic. He almost never spoke to the media or saw daylight and was, as far as anyone knew, holed up in a hotel suite with the shades pulled on the top floor of his own Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas. He was still wealthy and powerful, however, with a sprawling empire of businesses, including some that had done work—occasionally clandestine work—for the US government.
On top of that, Hughes Tool was a sensible partner. The Hughes fortune was built on the invention of a new type of rotary drill bit that opened up new areas for oil exploration by Howard Sr., and the company’s experience in mining by 1969 was widespread. No one would doubt a mining venture backed by Hughes Tool, and the company had a history with Global Marine, which had been using Hughes drill bits for years. Howard Hughes’s own interests in mining had mostly drifted away and been replaced by things like aviation and Hollywood, but he was still accumulating mining claims in Nevada and was rumored to be developing revolutionary mining methods using computers. “We just kept coming back to crazy old Howard,” Crooke later said.