The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Krutein was instructed to drive the truck slowly back down Ala Moana Boulevard, while officers standing off with cameras filmed any possible pursuit, then make his way to the Ilikai Hotel. There, as ordered, he parked in a space on the third level of the garage that opened up upon his arrival and got into the elevator. Inside, as promised, he found an officer named Hank with “thick black eyebrows” along with three other CIA officers. Krutein handed over the keys, got off on the tenth floor, and felt a wave of relief.

  There had been no interference, no sign of Soviet surveillance. Reassured that the cover was intact, the local security team delivered the boxes to an unmarked jet waiting at the airport to carry the new data back to Washington so that ship construction could begin.

  • • •

  Before Krutein could return to Los Angeles and resume his work promoting the cause of deep-ocean mining, the Agency had one last job for him. Parangosky and Lloyd had decided it was time to reveal “the customer” to the public. On December 7, 1970, Krutein’s apartment phone rang early in the morning. On the other end was Jack Reed, the man who’d hired him into the program, whom Eva had called “the harbinger of good news.” Global Marine and “the customer”—which in this case meant the Agency—were ready to reveal the name of the Deep Ocean Mining Project’s mysterious sponsor.

  Krutein was to prepare a party for thirty people at the Ilikai Hotel the next day, in the penthouse, if it wasn’t already booked. He should reserve twelve rooms for three nights for top officials from all the publicly participating companies, plus ten rooms for managers from the customer. Those officials were all already en route and would be arriving throughout the day, so he’d also need to arrange for sixteen cars at Hertz, all of them reserved under Global Marine.

  Invite the media, Reed said. Make sure the hotel provides an elevated stage, lectern, and microphone. Arrange some catering and drinks—and don’t forget the champagne. And tell everyone the party starts promptly at eleven A.M.

  The next morning, Manfred greeted Reed, who arrived first with Curtis Crooke, both of them looking surprised at how well the room had been staged in less than twenty-four hours. Crooke patted Krutein on the back. “I wondered, ‘How will Manfred manage all this in a short time?’” he said, laughing. “But then I told myself, ‘Why do we have a former U-boat captain in Hawaii?’ He can do anything.”

  By eleven A.M., the seats were filled with executives, several reporters, and a number of men in suits whom Krutein didn’t recognize. Crooke approached the stage, stepped behind the podium, and said, “Aloha, gentlemen!” He welcomed everyone to Hawaii and apologized for the secrecy of the mining project to that point. “Until now, there’s been a reluctance to tell the world who the customer is for this private venture. But now, our customer has decided to lift the curtain and indicate who is behind our secret project. Mr. Holliday, please come up here and lift the veil of secrecy.”

  Raymond Holliday, a handsome man with a helmet of thick gray hair, replaced Crooke at the podium and thanked him. Then he delivered the lines that quieted the room: “It was a pleasure for me and my colleagues from the Howard Hughes Tool Company in Houston to work with you and all the other directors of the companies. Our boss, Mr. Howard Hughes, has decided to show the world that he personally provided the finances for the unique task of mining manganese nodules from the seabed.”

  Krutein took the podium as soon as Holliday finished, announced that the buffet was open, and watched as the reporters all scrambled to get quotes from representatives of the major contractors. He smiled and stifled a laugh, realizing in the frantic reaction of this small group that the cover story he helped to perpetrate was even more powerful than he’d anticipated.

  Here was Howard Hughes—“a courageous pilot, flying planes at record speeds, who built the Spruce Goose out of plywood, put film stars on ice for future films which were never realized, bought all the silver mines of this country to get control over the silver market,” he wrote in his memoir—now giving birth to an entirely new industry. The newspapers would soon be full of stories about him, Krutein thought. “The hoax will go on.”

  23

  We Need a Bigger Boat

  The Glomar II mission had mixed results. It was a success in that Joe Houston’s catfish solution did its job precisely as intended, and the ship’s rig captured incredibly detailed photos of the wreck site. But it was also a failure, because the sampling device that was supposed to penetrate and grab a chunk of the seafloor snapped off the end of the pipe string when it struck the bottom. That meant there was no soil sample, and the capture vehicle design would have to continue with no clear knowledge of what material the wreck was lying in. It was yet another unknown to toss atop the growing pile.

  Nonetheless, the mission had an impact on John Graham’s design. The new photos showed that the ship he’d drawn up wasn’t big enough for the job. Graham’s original design called for a hull 105 feet 8.5 inches wide—a size that was stable enough to support the various bulky systems and that allowed for a sixty-four-foot-wide moon pool, wide enough to fit the recovered submarine and capture vehicle, while still being narrow enough to fit through the Panama Canal, which provides the shortest path to the West Coast.

  But the new photo survey revealed that the K-129 was leaning over more than previously thought, so that it would be coming up with the sail tilted sideways, rather than straight up. Because of this, a portion would protrude out, creating a wider profile. A sixty-four-foot-wide moon pool wasn’t going to be wide enough.

  Fortunately, this was something that John Graham was already coming to terms with, for other reasons that had arisen at almost the same time that the information from the Glomar II came back to Parangosky’s group. Graham had asked his young architect Chuck Cannon to maintain a vessel weight and center-of-gravity estimate, and to recalculate this estimate every month based on the latest information from Global Marine’s engineers and the contractors. What worried Graham the most was how this center of gravity would change when the moon pool was open and flooded, with the pipe string fully deployed and loaded with the capture vehicle and submarine. His concern was that if the ship were to list too far to the side during the recovery, the fully loaded pipe string could come into contact with the edge of the moon pool. And this would be very bad.

  One of the ship’s cleverest designs was the gimbaled platform, which used bearings and shock absorbers to keep the derrick and pipe steady, even when the ship was rolling in an active seaway. But the ship could roll only so much before its hull would hit the pipe, and the design needed to allow for plenty of leeway. The loaded pipe would be close to its maximum stress limit during the recovery, and if it were to contact the hull, it would almost certainly break, “with disastrous consequences to the ship, crew, and mission,” according to Cannon.

  Just about the time the CIA team back east was realizing that the moon pool wasn’t wide enough, Cannon noticed a problem. Based on his latest numbers, the hull wasn’t nearly wide enough to keep the ship stable and safe during pipe-string operations. And Cannon panicked. Being relatively junior, he took the results first to his immediate superior, who said he would take them to Graham and then didn’t. After a week of silence, Cannon mustered his courage and took the result to Graham himself. Graham exploded. “Get your calculations together, we are going to Langley in the morning!” he barked.

  Global Marine’s chief architect knew that his ship was going to have to get wider and that a change of this magnitude so late in the process was unprecedented. The ship’s drawings and calculations had already been submitted to the American Bureau of Shipping and the Coast Guard for regulatory approvals, and preliminary construction was under way outside Philadelphia. Steel for the hull plating had been ordered and the 20-foot 11.75-inch-wide wing walls were already being built at the shipyard.

  Curtis Crooke ordered a temporary stop on work and he, Graham, and Cannon flew east to tell Parangosk
y they were going to have to increase the ship’s beam by ten feet. That would set construction back, sure, and also create a logistical problem. The redesigned ship was going to be too wide for the Panama Canal; it would have to sail around the southern tip of South America instead.

  This would be Cannon’s first and only trip to the East Coast program office. The Global group caught a direct flight to Washington Dulles the next day and went first to see an old colleague of Graham’s at the David Taylor Model Basin to discuss the problem and get his opinion on the results. A day later, Cannon found himself in a large conference room at a remote CIA site in northern Virginia next to his two bosses and looking out at more than twenty unfamiliar faces. Graham introduced Cannon and explained what he’d found.

  No one was less happy than Parangosky to hear that the ship’s construction would need to pause while they widened the hull, costing the program time and money, neither of which was abundant or easy to come by, but he recognized that this was necessary—and would simultaneously solve the problem indicated by the new round of photos from the Glomar II. Sure, divers could go into the water with torches and cut away the K-129’s conning tower’s top and periscopes, but a wider moon pool would make that unnecessary. This ship had to get bigger.

  24

  The Mother of All Barges

  The first major Azorian component finished was the submersible dry dock, known as the Hughes Mining Barge 1, or the HMB-1. Necessity dictated this, because work on Lockheed’s capture vehicle couldn’t begin until the barge had been moved to Redwood City, fifteen minutes south of San Francisco International Airport, to become the enclosure in which the claw—or the mining machine, as the press and public understood it—could be constructed in secret.

  Work on the barge began on May 11, 1971, at National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, in San Diego, the only new-construction shipyard on the West Coast, and one that specialized in building ships for the Navy, meaning it was accustomed to large and complicated jobs.

  Lockheed hired Larry Glosten, one of the country’s most innovative naval architects, to handle the barge, and gave him fifteen months to deliver it. Glosten served in the Pacific during World War II and later worked in the Navy’s Bureau of Ships before opening his own shop in Seattle. Glosten asked Tom Bringloe, a young graduate of the University of Michigan’s Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, to be the primary architect, and by the spring of 1971, he’d finished the project, on schedule and on budget.

  Bringloe got his first hint that the barge wasn’t really going to be used for mining when a neighbor stopped him to say that a private investigator had come by asking questions about his background and character, ostensibly as part of the evaluation process for a large insurance policy. He hadn’t applied for any insurance policy, but he suspected that wasn’t the true story, anyway—a hunch confirmed when Glosten summoned him to a meeting where two men in suits explained that his services were required for the national security of the United States and that he should never speak about the work he was about to do, even to family.

  Glosten and Bringloe didn’t have a lot to go on. Their primary Lockheed contact gave them only the barest of details—the principal dimensions of the barge and its structural requirements, written, literally, on a single sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch copy paper. What Bringloe created was a barge so immense that it could host basketball tournaments or rock concerts. But the HMB-1 was clever, too. It had to be submersible to a depth at which John Graham’s ship could moor over it and extract the claw, using the ocean as a cover so that the transfer could be made covertly. Bringloe put hard and soft tanks on the bow and stern that would be flooded to sink the barge and then pumped dry to bring it back to the surface. This process could be started from a small control room aboard the HMB-1 and completed remotely from a tug.

  Construction of the barge progressed from stern to bow and keel to roof in stages. The work wasn’t secret, and there wasn’t anything terribly unusual about a giant dry dock, but it wasn’t openly promoted, either, and Parangosky wanted it that way. He was very surprised, then, when word arrived on January 3 that President Nixon would be appearing at the shipyard the following day to make an official announcement. Parangosky cringed at the idea of a huge public spectacle, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  On January 4, Nixon stood at a podium in front of two thousand union men in hard hats and announced a 54.6-million-dollar contract to National Steel to build three new tankers for the US Merchant Marine fleet. The president arrived by helicopter from his mansion in San Clemente and toured the yard, then told the assembled crowd that other maritime nations were outbuilding the United States, putting this proud naval power in “a second class position around the world.” It was critical for America to amend this emerging crisis, he said, to return to its rightful place as “number one.” To Parangosky’s great relief, the speech was widely covered, but the stories made no mention of the barge or the mining operation.

  • • •

  Construction of the HMB-1 was fast and furious, taking only nine months. On April 14, the hull was launched and moved to the outfitting dock, where the roof was added and the wiring completed. By April 20, the world’s largest submersible barge was ready for progressive sea tests. The first was a partial submergence, held off of Coronado Island, in San Diego Bay, and it went smoothly. Anchors were set and the tanks filled. By evening, the HMB-1 was sitting on the seafloor in fifty-five feet of water. There were no complications, and by morning it had surfaced again.

  From there, a tug towed the barge north, to Isthmus Cove, off Catalina Island, where a series of four tests in progressively deeper water would be held until the barge had proven it worked up to 182 feet, the depth required for mating with the ship. On the first dive, conducted April 24, a pocket of air got trapped inside, just under the roof, so that as quickly as the HMB-1 descended under the water, it popped right back up to the surface. That air slowly escaped through holes in the roof, however, and once it was all gone the barge sank again.

  This wasn’t a difficult fix. Operators merely blew the ballast tanks prior to the next dive to make the barge negatively buoyant, and the next two dives—to 125 and 165 feet—were uneventful. But on the fourth and final dive, to maximum depth, a valve failed during submersion, causing the surface crew to lose control of the actuators that regulated buoyancy. As a result, the HMB-1 sat parked on the bottom, helpless, until divers were sent down and into the flooded control room to reopen the valves by hand. Engineers under Tom Bringloe’s direction quickly solved this problem, too, and on May 10, a tug pulled the HMB-1 out of the test site and headed north, up the coast, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and through the bay to Redwood City, where construction of the last and most sensitive piece of submarine salvage equipment could finally begin.

  “Somehow I sense with the launching of this vessel, we are witnessing the birth of a new industry,” Howard Hughes’s Ocean Mining Project chief Paul Reeve told reporters.

  25

  Oh My Darling, Clementine

  It was fine to build the ship and barge in public. John Parangosky and Walt Lloyd wanted the media to observe the enigmatic processes of Howard Hughes, the one man just crazy enough to mine the ocean. That was the whole con. But there was one component of the system that had to remain secret: the capture vehicle. This was the thing that would actually grab and lift the sub from the ocean floor, and it was the only piece of machinery that couldn’t be explained in public.

  Lockheed’s Ocean Systems Division leased a plot of land along some undeveloped marshy waterfront in Redwood City, fifteen minutes south of San Francisco International Airport, erected two corrugated tin hangars—one large and one small—and encircled the lot in an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Light towers went up at the corners, and a single guard shack was manned twenty-four hours a day just inside the gate.

  The smalle
r building was storage, and the larger one was divided into two sections, one for the machine and welding shop, the other for the small army of engineers who worked in tight rows at drafting boards and desks.

  Lockheed’s involvement wasn’t a secret, nor was the fact that the company was building a mystery machine inside the giant barge that had been docked at Redwood City, and certain activities were staged in service of the cover. Close watch was kept on the schedule of Russia’s spy satellites, which passed overhead at the same time every day. Eight-foot steel squares were built as prototype storage containers for the manganese nodules that would be sucked up off the ocean floor and placed outside on the docks at strategic times, so that they’d be seen and photographed by the passing satellites. Then they’d be moved inside, so that the next time the satellites passed over they would see the containers had been relocated, most likely onto the mining barge.

  The CIA picked Lockheed because of the long-standing cooperation between the two entities on black programs. Parangosky had worked only on aerospace jobs with Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works, but he knew the Navy had hired Ocean Systems for several secret deep-sea submersible projects, and he’d called upon Jim Wenzel, the division’s head, in the early days of the task force to serve as an additional set of technical eyes when the CIA was considering concepts. Later, when the group had decided on the grunt-lift method, Parangosky went back to Wenzel with a project. He wanted a proposal for what a theoretical capture vehicle might look like.

  Wenzel had a problem. No one in his group was cleared into Azorian, and Parangosky wasn’t willing to grant any more clearances at that early stage. As a result, Wenzel couldn’t even use his secretary to type his proposal; he wrote it by hand on a legal pad and carried it himself to Virginia, where the task force liked the concept enough to give Lockheed the job.