The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Eva Krutein had just walked in from running errands when the phone began to ring. She was only stopping quickly at home to pick up sheet music for her harpsichord class and had wanted to let the answering machine pick up, only it didn’t. One of her two kids must have unplugged the machine or maybe Eva forgot to turn it on, so after eight or nine rings the feisty German émigré stomped over to the phone and snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “This is Jack Reed from Global Marine,” a man’s voice said. “May I talk to Manfred Krutein?”

  Eva apologized and said that her husband was on the other side of the country, at a conference in Washington, DC. Could she take a message?

  “Please tell him that the Los Angeles office of Global Marine wants him for a big ocean-mining project,” Reed answered. “Do you think he would be interested?”

  Eva didn’t need to ask. Her husband was employed by General Dynamics, his latest job in a long and circuitous path through the world of naval engineering. A German U-boat engineer during the war in Europe, Krutein fled Germany after the Soviet tanks rolled in, settled in Poland, married, and became a naval architect who founded his own shipyard, which thrived. When the Soviets seized Poland, Krutein sold the shipyard and attempted to emigrate to the United States but was unable to get a visa. In 1951, he went to Chile instead and worked as an engineer at a copper mine until 1959, when the Soviets launched Sputnik and the United States was suddenly very receptive to foreign scientists. Krutein flew to New York in May 1960, caught a Greyhound to California, and within a day got a job as a design engineer with Utah Construction and Mining in Palo Alto.

  Because of his experience, Krutein took an extreme, almost obsessive, interest in a new field that was just starting to bubble up: ocean mining. He saw in this emerging field a great opportunity for developing new ships and equipment.

  General Dynamics saw potential, too. The company hired Krutein in 1966 to move to San Diego and work on submersibles, with an eye on utilizing them to do research for deep-sea mining.

  Then, with the president’s 1970 UN announcement, the Nixon administration ceased all funding for oceanography. Among the projects this affected was General Dynamics’ research into ocean mining, Krutein’s passion. He was crushed. Jack Reed’s call, then, was an answered prayer.

  When Krutein returned to California, he drove up to Los Angeles for a meeting near LAX with Reed, who introduced himself as Global’s personnel manager, Curtis Crooke, and John Graham. After some discussion about Krutein’s background in ship design and submersible research, the men probed him about the feasibility of ocean mining, and though he was thrilled to discuss this subject, Krutein couldn’t help but feel like there was some part of the story they weren’t telling him.

  Reed left the room and returned with a sheet of paper that referred to an important government project “whose data and actions were the property of Global Marine and had to be kept secret.” Krutein scanned the document, took the pen that Reed offered him, and signed it. At which point Curtis Crooke smiled and unspooled the most incredible story Krutein had ever heard. “I was shocked to my bones,” he wrote in a journal that he kept secret for years and later published as part of a memoir cowritten with his wife.

  He sat there a moment, stunned, and then told the men that what they were proposing would require a massive ship of a kind never before built. Graham, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke, chuckled. That ship was already being designed.

  Krutein was told to gather the research he’d been accumulating on ocean mining and present it to the CIA, to assure the Agency that this cover would plausibly allow for the actual operation. Then he was to join the project and help to create a story that would explain the ship, its equipment, and the area in which it would be working.

  What Krutein had already learned in his limited exposure to companies pursuing ocean mining was that they disclosed almost no details about their technical plans. And the area where the Soviet sub lay, by some miracle of luck, would support the story, so long as no one else studied it too closely. It wasn’t the ideal zone for mining manganese—the nodule quality wasn’t great there—but it wasn’t an unbelievable story, either.

  “Manfred, you’ve got a hell of a job!” he recalls Crooke telling him. “Everything depends on the efficiency of the cover. If it breaks, we can close shop.”

  For the last decade of his life, Krutein had been collecting articles, papers, and studies about ocean mining, and shortly after that meeting, he gathered the best of them into a briefcase and flew to Dulles, outside Washington, where he checked into a hotel and, as directed, never let the briefcase out of his sight. (He even slept with it under his comforter.)

  The next day, Krutein caught a taxi to a prearranged address and—as he tells it in his very colorful diary—was met by two men in suits who showed him into an elevator that went down from the ground level, at least three stories. There, he was ushered past a security guard and into a small electric vehicle that drove him through a long tunnel to another elevator that took him back up into another building, where he was shown into a room filled with men.

  “Well, here he is—our U-boat captain,” he recalls the leader of them saying.

  “I was only a Third Watch Officer in the Atlantic,” Krutein replied. Then, over the next three days, he presented his ocean-mining expertise, answered questions, and helped John Parangosky’s team begin to construct the cover operation. “On this trip I entered the Great Game of Intelligence,” he wrote. “What an adventure!”

  Back in the program office, Krutein attended all design meetings so that no question about the ship or its equipment would stump him. He would also travel with Crooke, Graham, and security personnel whenever they needed to visit a potential customer, serving as “Manager, Ocean Mining Technology.” Mainly, though, his job was to attend conferences as a representative of a mysterious mining operation with major ambitions and an expedited timeline, and say very little. Until instructed, he wasn’t even supposed to disclose the name of Global Marine’s “customer,” who, he was to tell people, preferred to stay silent for now.

  Even Krutein’s family had no idea what he was doing, and on his frequent travels, he had to cover his tracks with lies. Occasionally this created awkward situations of his own doing, like when he ran into a neighbor after returning from a visit to San Diego. Unprepared for the encounter, he panicked and said he’d been in New York, where the weather had been “beautiful.”

  “That’s strange,” the neighbor replied. “I talked to my sister there today and she said it’s been pouring for days.”

  Flustered, Krutein explained that he’d been stuck in his hotel the entire trip and had rarely seen the outdoors.

  • • •

  Krutein decided that he needed help. A legitimate mining effort of this size would have a larger staff of scientific experts, so he asked Global Marine to find him a geologist.

  The company already had one: Dave Pasho, who was working on offshore mineral deposits such as tin and phosphorites in GMI’s exploration group. Pasho was hired by GMI in the fall of 1969 to bridge the period between completion of Army Reserve basic training and the start of grad school at the University of Southern California in the spring.

  In early 1970, Curtis Crooke offered him a full-time job working on seabed mining and assigned him to work under a gregarious German named Manfred. Pasho quit his grad program with a master’s in offshore phosphorites and went into the business of seabed exploration.

  Krutein told his young geologist to look at ten offshore sites and to analyze marine resources like gold, phosphorites, and manganese in these locations to determine if there was commercial potential in harvesting them. He said that Global Marine was especially interested in manganese, and he wanted Pasho to absorb all of the scientific literature on the subject and learn everything he could about nodules—especially where they were found in greatest concentrations, and wh
at the company would need to know in order to potentially mine them.

  Every time Pasho reported back to Krutein, however, he was met with peculiar questions. His boss was insistent that he focus on the viability of the North Pacific as a mining site.

  Yes, there are manganese nodules there, Pasho would tell him, but they were particularly deep, much more so than in other locations he’d been studying, and of a lower quality than deposits in other areas. What’s more, that area of the Pacific Ocean was notoriously difficult to operate in, known for bad weather and violent seas. But it was the sampling device designed for a ship the engineers were working on that really didn’t make sense to Pasho. The ship was the Glomar II and it was supposedly being prepared for a prototype mining trip out in the Pacific. Pasho had seen the sketches and models of the so-called sampling device, and he knew that no sane engineer would sign off on a design like that if the real purpose of the mission was to reap sample nodules from the floor.

  He grew more and more suspicious. The concept—essentially a big clamshell to grab things off the seabed—just didn’t seem right. Pasho wanted to know and have a better understanding of what he was doing, so he typed out a memo explaining his confusion about the project and delivered it to Krutein’s desk.

  A day later, Pasho was summoned to the office of Global’s VP, John Evans. The moment he walked through the door, he knew he’d stumbled into something. Three men in suits, one wearing sunglasses, stood around the office, looking almost stuffed. Evans handed Pasho a piece of paper.

  “Maybe you want to take a look at this and sign it,” he said.

  Pasho signed Walt Lloyd’s secrecy form, embossed with a bald eagle, and got the story. The next day, fully cleared, he moved out of Global Marine’s downtown headquarters and into a new location known as “the program office.”

  20

  The Program Office

  The hub of Azorian’s operations became the West Coast program office, a two-floor complex just five minutes by car from the Tishman Building, where Curtis Crooke and his small team had done the initial assessment studies with MRI. The choice of location was fairly simple: Howard Hughes had a building abutting the airport to house some of his smaller operations, with only a few outside tenants, one of which was the US government. The building, at the corner of West Century Boulevard and Sepulveda, was a local landmark. People who flew into LAX knew it for the large HUGHES logo up near the roof that was lit up in blue after dark.

  Visitors who came to the program office via its ostensibly public but rarely visited cover headquarters took the elevator to the fifth floor, walked down a long hall, turned right, and stopped at the door marked with a brass plaque that read SUMMA CORPORATION—GLOBAL MARINE (Summa Corporation being the new name of the various Hughes businesses that remained after Hughes Tool was sold off earlier in 1970). Through the door was a large office with low-pile industrial carpet, a drop ceiling, and pegboard walls.

  Visitors encountered a cheerful secretary and walls festooned with engineering drawings and schematics for the exciting new industry that was being created across the lobby, in the offices beyond a single closed door. In reality, that door led to a secured warren of spaces where Global employees, representatives from each of the subcontractors, Agency personnel, and consultants all worked together designing a system to steal a Soviet submarine without anyone on earth knowing that they’d done it.

  All of those people who worked in the open arrived and departed by this fifth-floor entry, and did so with no pretense of cautiousness. They were supposed to be showing up at their jobs—building the world’s first deep-sea-mining company.

  Government agents, however, were to avoid the fifth floor. They came and went according to schedules that seemed erratic but were actually highly planned, and went instead to the sixth floor, where a single door marked DEFENSE CONTRACT AUDIT AGENCY, or DCAA, led into a typical government office, sparsely decorated and filled with dated furniture and disinterested bureaucrats.

  The DCAA was a legitimate office that did indeed audit defense contracts, making it a useful cover for federal employees who happened to be CIA officers, but the operations were mostly remote. The bulk of the work here required no interaction with the public.

  Like the Deep Ocean Mining Project (DOMP) office downstairs, the DCAA also had a lobby leading to a second entry, which held more bureaucrats and also a second, less-visible area. The most secure section was a small communications vault, which connected the program office to Parangosky’s base back east in Washington, and to the various cleared contractor offices, via secure telex, secure cable (an electronic transmission with NSA-enabled encryption), and the so-called bubble phone, nicknamed the Donald Duck phone because even the most dignified voice sounded like a cartoon duck when run through the scrambler. “It was hard just trying to tell yes from no,” as Curtis Crooke recalled it, only half joking.

  Messages between the coasts were encrypted and sent by high-frequency radio link. A radio operator would receive the message, then use a key to decipher it. CIA policy required accountability and a record of all communications, so, using the Jennifer code system, every message began with an indicator of its destination—the program office was “Jot”; the Washington office was “Jungle”—followed by the message itself. It was signed using the sender’s designated code name—Mr. Lion for Parangosky, the king of the Jungle, for instance—and then stored away.

  The sixth floor contained all of the necessary Agency security—a document safe, cipher locks, guards, and of course a hidden staircase. The link between the two floors was in the rear of the DCAA space, in an area that visitors would rarely, if ever, enter. There, two metal storage cabinets could be slid aside to reveal a secret door that opened to a stairway.

  Every morning, the security staff opened this secret door, and they left it open for the duration of the day. And every night, they closed it up, so that the cleaning crew—which was CIA approved but had only limited clearance—was never aware of its presence. Rumor had it they even buffed the floor around the cabinets to remove any signs that they had been moved.

  The staircase was nicknamed Harvey, for the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit that costarred in the 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name, and the secret door that led to it was known as Harvey Wallbanger, after the popular cocktail that employees ordered late at night at the Oar House in Venice Beach, once it became too difficult to enunciate the bar’s specialty, the JC Fudpuckers.

  At the end of every workday, all documents, notes, plans, and photographs were locked away in special safes approved for use in the Jennifer security system. Nothing even remotely sensitive was to be left on desks, and the most secret documents were stored in a special vault up on the sixth floor, secured with cipher locks and accessible only by the security staff. If someone needed a document from that vault, it had to be requested and signed out so that there was always a clear chain of custody.

  As far as the outside world was concerned, the DOMP was a Summa/Hughes project with a tall Texas gentleman named Paul Reeve in charge. In reality, Curtis Crooke ran the project engineering, and John Parangosky was the man behind the curtain, in an unmarked office building three thousand miles away.

  • • •

  To the majority of the contractors in the program office, Parangosky was a ghost. Virtually no one knew his actual name, and those who ranked high enough to have occasional interactions with the operation’s chief knew him only as “John P,” “Mr. P,” or “JP.”

  Parangosky was fanatical about security and along with his other top lieutenants—Agency lifers—considered himself “sight sensitive,” meaning that he assumed his true identity was known by foreign intelligence services and so under no circumstances could he be seen anywhere near the open parts of the DOMP operation—the shipyard where construction would take place, Lockheed’s Redwood City base, or the program office.

  Every so often, Parango
sky would fly to LA for program review meetings, requiring that he be “scrubbed” by the security team en route. Upon landing, he would proceed to one of several designated safe houses in Marina del Rey, pick up new identification, and be given a disguise—typically, new clothes, a wig, and sometimes a set of lifts to alter his height.

  Once at the office, sight sensitive visitors would stay in the building, away from the windows, until it was time to leave. There was no going out for lunch; security guys would bring food in, and in the case of some of the longer design reviews, which could stretch over most of a day, attendees might sit in the office’s windowless conference room through both lunch and dinner. And when a meeting wrapped, there was no happy hour with the Summa and Global engineers, either. The East Coast staff would head back through Harvey up to the sixth floor, then slip quietly out through the garage, where cars took them directly onto the runway to the plane.

  These arrivals and departures were some of the most carefully orchestrated activities of the program. Newbies—for instance, technical specialists who might be coming for a onetime visit—arrived by plane and were taken to a car with flashing blue lights on the tarmac and driven straight across to an unmarked garage on the airport’s south side, where a security guard checked them in at an unremarkable entrance and arranged a transfer to the program office.

  One tentpole of CIA protocol was that no agency operative should travel on his own name. They all had official cover, often multiple covers, and which one was used at a particular moment depended on the program. When Parangosky worked on the U-2 and the A-12, he traveled under Air Force cover, as a civilian employee. He’d carry Air Force credentials, which included a phone number that appeared to be at the Pentagon but actually rang through to Langley, to a special cover office. There, a dedicated security officer answered the phone and vouched for whoever the caller was asking about. “Oh, yes,” he’d say. “Mr. McIninch”—Thomas McIninch being one of Parangosky’s cover names—“works here, but he’s not in the office at the moment.”