The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  And of course Parangosky got it. He knew that Lloyd was right, just as Lloyd knew that Davis was right. You have to do what you say you’re doing.

  • • •

  Up to this point, specific positions on the ocean were still identified the way they had been for centuries—by using a sextant. The Sea Scope was one of the first vessels ever equipped with satellite navigation, which at that time was the size of a refrigerator and built by Magnavox.

  Parangosky’s one directive for the mining tests was that they be done quickly. There was little need—or time—to perfect any of the systems, and he told Graham that he needed only to get a fake ship seaworthy, with credible-enough-looking tools on board to make it look legitimate and withstand any scrutiny from other companies that would be watching closely.

  The quality or abundance of the nodules in this case was of no importance. The ship merely had to find some samples and suck them up, and that’s what the Sea Scope would do.

  The job of outfitting the old World War II minesweeper was handed to John Parsons, a young engineer who served in Vietnam with the Marines. After Vietnam, Parsons went to Berkeley to study engineering with a focus on ocean mining, and that’s where he met and befriended Jack Graham, John’s son, then married his daughter, Jennifer, before joining the old man in the engineering department at Global Marine.

  Parsons worked various projects under Graham and was in the Philippines when Crooke summoned him home to do the thing he wanted to do more than anything—design an ocean-mining system. He was thrilled to get the chance and then, after arriving at the program office and receiving a brief from Paul Ito, deeply disappointed that it wasn’t going to happen.

  Crooke promised Parsons there would be some actual mining, at least enough to convince doubters, and assigned him to work under Manfred Krutein and his geologist, Dave Pasho, in a windowless room that was probably better suited for storing brooms.

  Parsons had two projects. One was to design what they’d nicknamed the “mini-miner,” a prototype mining vehicle that could be loaded onto the ship once it reached California and then taken out and deployed on sea tests, in order to check the various systems while also doing a little pretend mining. Really, it was to be a feature player in an expensive piece of theater.

  But after Lloyd’s trip to New York, Parsons’ focus was shifted to the Sea Scope. He spent a few weeks modifying the ship’s enormous fantail to hold a winch with thousands of feet of cable atop an A-frame. Using that winch, they would raise and lower a drag bucket to pick up nodules from the seafloor off the coast of Mexico.

  • • •

  Dave Pasho had been chief scientist on several cruises for his graduate work, so he was familiar with life on the ocean when he joined the Sea Scope’s small crew. But the conditions on this cruise were punishing from the outset. Almost as soon as they departed Long Beach harbor and pointed a course north, the weather turned nasty. Pasho did his best to ignore the misery and even found a way to enjoy the rough water. He and some of the other young crewmen would go up to the top of the bridge, on the deck outside, and wait for the ship to rise and crest a giant wave. Just as the ship reached the lip and was about to drop over the back side of the wave, he would jump as high as he could into the wind and hang there, as the ship plunged over the side, so that by the time his feet touched back down on the deck it would be ten feet lower than it had been when he jumped.

  That was the ship’s pattern for hours and days—up the slope of a big wave, and then over the cliff and into the gap on the back: Boom! The relentless pounding made it hard to sleep or even relax, and Pasho actually began to worry after a while. He sought out James Drahos, the ship’s first mate, and asked, with a clearly concerned expression, “Are we okay out here?”

  Drahos—whose company nickname was Drainhose—nodded blankly.

  Another worry was the Soviets. The crew had been briefed before the trip that while there was no reason to fear any specific actions, the Soviets considered a large rectangle of the Pacific to be a sensitive zone, and there was always a chance that unfamiliar vessels entering that vast area could be harassed. Walt Lloyd and Parangosky had asked the ship’s captain to get somewhat close to the target area, at least in the same general vicinity, to establish even more precedent that this Howard Hughes mining operation was known to operate out there.

  The Sea Scope sailed first to an area off the Mexican coast, to retrieve nodules of high quality, and then headed north, toward the target site, pausing periodically for additional tests that, everyone hoped, the Soviets would be watching. In the North Pacific, it conducted a few additional tests. One attempted to take a soil sample in an area not far from the target site employing a commonly used method of core sampling. An open-ended metal tube on a string was released and allowed to free fall from fifty or so feet above the seafloor in the hopes that it would penetrate the soil and snatch some material, like a straw in Jell-O. It works, however, only if the floor is soft, and in this case the sampler bounced and its nose crumpled.

  As the ship sucked in nodules—nearly forty thousand pounds in total, valued at twenty to thirty dollars a ton—Pasho analyzed them in the ship’s onboard wet chemistry lab. He had to measure and document the size of every nodule harvested, then use a hacked-together still built out of flasks and glassware from the galley to perform analytical chemistry—and also make moonshine. Every scoop brought in a hodgepodge of sea life, much of it bizarre, and Pasho logged that, too. He made notes about octopi, sea cucumbers, and lots of tunicates that came up along with the nodules, preserving a sample of each species in formaldehyde and then carefully recording the sample, the location of its discovery, and other pertinent data into a record that was taken back to headquarters and then filed away.

  Arguably the most important thing the Sea Scope did was establish a pattern of activity. It sailed a course that would later be followed by the real mining ship, made a port call in Hawaii, and broadcasted radio chatter with the intention that it would be monitored by competitors and the Soviets.

  When the ship returned to California, the nodules were boxed up and sent off to various locations, one of them a company that Walt Lloyd hired to clean, prep, and mount individual black rocks inside of small, clear cases that would be marked with the logo of Summa’s Deep Ocean Mining Project for distribution to anyone who might want a souvenir.

  29

  A Ship Rises in Philadelphia

  Global Marine designed vessels; it didn’t build them. To construct Azorian’s ship, Crooke and Graham strongly recommended to Parangosky that the Agency select Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia.

  Sun Ship belonged to the Pew family, owners of Sun Oil, better known as Sunoco. The site had been in operation since the late 1800s, but the Pews, one of America’s wealthiest families, bought it in 1916 and built the yard into a booming operation that was, by World War II, the world’s preeminent site for the manufacture of oil tankers. Sun Ship also had a reputation for taking on unusual projects. So when a contract came in to build the world’s first ocean-mining vessel, an enormous modified drillship designed to suck nodules off of the floor of the Pacific, it didn’t strike anyone in the engineering department as all that strange, particularly considering that Howard Hughes was involved.

  Only Bob Dunlap, the chairman of Sun Oil, was fully briefed on the true nature of the project. Even Paul Atkinson, the president, was uncleared when the job arrived, in part to prevent him from driving up the price, which he might have done if he knew that the US government was writing the checks.

  Jon Matthews was a rising design engineer in the yard, a cocky twenty-seven-year-old eager to prove how skilled he was in a department loaded with experienced shipbuilders. He began the Global Marine project as one of many engineers, but by the time Azorian’s ship was ready to leave Chester, more than a year later, Matthews had become the youngest man ever t
o run the yard’s engineering shop and had nearly 250 men working under him.

  Press reports about the ship’s owner inevitably questioned the commercial viability of deep-ocean mining, but the only thing that concerned Matthews was how his staff could actually build the extremely complicated ship that arrived in his office as a set of plans drawn up by John Graham.

  The actual construction of a large vessel is an interplay between its naval architect and the engineers who have to figure out how to convert those drawings into pieces of steel that are assembled into a ship. But this was John Graham’s baby, and although his office was technically back in California, he became a bicoastal commuter for the duration of the ship’s construction, spending six of seven days every week in Philadelphia and the seventh in LA, visiting his engineering staff, as well as Nell and the kids.

  When he was in Pennsylvania, Graham essentially lived out of the Sun Ship engineering shop, leaving only briefly to sleep a few hours at a Holiday Inn just south of Chester. He began each morning with a meeting of the various section chiefs to discuss what would be done that day, and ended his shift after dark with a debrief that covered progress, problems that had come up, and what could be done the next day.

  Over and over, Matthews studied Graham’s ideas and challenged the yard’s teams to figure out how to bring them to life. Without computers to run the modeling, there was only faith, and pencils. Matthews did his best to design in a way that predicted problems that might occur, but he estimated that as much as 50 percent of what his crew did was guesswork.

  More than anything, what challenged Sun Ship’s capabilities was the heavy-lift system, which would be the most powerful ever constructed. This was the largest and most complex drillship ever conceived, with the unique ability to store and move twenty thousand feet of threaded gun-barrel steel pipe, built in thirty-foot sections of six tapered diameters ranging from fifteen and a half to twelve and three-quarters inches. These sections were stored in six bays in sixty-foot “doubles” that, when it came time to deploy the string, would all assemble into a robust umbilical for a mining machine that could be lowered and raised from the bottom of the ocean.

  To deal with this pipe, the ship had a semiautomatic handling system that would retrieve the doubles from the storage bays and convey them to a vertical position in the derrick for sequential assembly into the pipe string. The system was designed to retrieve and deliver to the derrick one forty-thousand-pound double every ten minutes, using a system of cranes, conveyor belts, and elevators, even in rough seas.

  Before they attempted to build the real thing, Sun’s engineers constructed a one-tenth-scale model in an empty room next to the engineering office. There, Jon Matthews would have weekly meetings with his production superintendents, who had never built anything so intricate. Each section of pipe put tremendous load on the yard’s cranes. When it came time to actually lift items such as the gimbaled platform, derrick, and heavy-lift system components from the docks onto the ship, a custom crane barge was built specifically for the job. It was, naturally, the largest on the East Coast.

  • • •

  The mining ship was a dream job for everyone in the yard. At first, Sun’s estimators were wary of taking their price projections for certain parts and systems to Global Marine, expecting to be chased out of the office over what seemed like outrageous costs, but every time, they were told, “That’s fine. Whatever it takes.” It was, as Matthews liked to say, a pure muscle project. When in doubt, throw talent and money at a problem, and soon enough a solution appears. If the staff couldn’t do it, they’d call in a contractor. If he failed, they’d try another one. From the onset, the total cost was going to top 50 million dollars (and could be as high as 100 million dollars), at a time when the average ship built in the yard cost 12 million dollars.

  Sun’s management was frequently reminded that the customer was a very secretive man who greatly valued privacy and intellectual property, and that whenever possible, the work should be concealed from view. Meetings were held to discuss how to disguise the ship’s inner workings from airplane flyovers.

  Periodically, new faces would appear—guys in suits, guys in mufti, guys who just looked official—and the Sun crew knew better than to interact or ask any questions. When in doubt, any mysterious person or matter could be explained in two words: Howard Hughes.

  The final product was absolutely John Graham’s ship—it was the concept he designed, at unprecedented scale—but to bring it to life required constant iteration, and the reengineering of nearly everything on a detailed level in order to actually make it work. In that way, Sun Ship’s engineers played as large a role as anyone in Graham’s California shop.

  Unlike any other ship built in Chester, the Hughes ship was a fluid vessel, designed by necessity on the fly, and this made it impractical for Global Marine and Sun Ship to draw up a single, definitive contract for the job. Instead, the two companies worked according to a very basic agreement that was expanded and amended as needed. Anytime Graham came up with a new idea, necessitating an unexpected piece of work, lawyers for both sides would write up a change order and execute a price. In practice, this was exhausting work, especially for the project’s in-house counsel, an ex-Navy man named Dave Toy, who had worked with Global Marine on drilling contracts since the early 1960s. He was based in LA but spent much of 1972 on planes crossing America.

  Toy was essentially on call in California, waiting to hear from Graham or the shipyard lawyers, who would call and say, “We’ve got a problem. Can you come out and help us fix it?” One week, Toy made three separate round trips between Sunday and Friday—each one on a different airline, and at a slightly different time, on orders from the hypercautious security staff—and by the week’s end, he was so visibly exhausted that a kind stewardess moved him from his coach seat to first class, gave him the whole row, and told him he didn’t even need to sit up to eat. She just put a pillow on his chest, laid the tray on the pillow, and helped Toy eat. By the time the project was finished, he had drawn up 150 different change orders, and similar patterns were also in play at Lockheed, Western Gear, and all the other contractors.

  This was how big contracts worked, particularly ones that were on an accelerated pace. As a CIA officer planted in the program office’s purchasing department liked to explain it, the way to get audacious projects through Congress was to low-ball the cost and complexity, and then—once work was under way—there was little choice but to approve the budget changes. More pointedly, he said: “We give ’em the tree and fuck ’em on the lights.”

  • • •

  Ship construction is controlled chaos under the best of circumstances, but on a project as urgent as the Hughes mining ship, the chaos was magnified, and keeping the ship on schedule while accommodating the inevitable complications was one of the biggest day-to-day challenges for Sun’s staff.

  Materials run low, parts arrive late, and mistakes in the plans appear, but Sun Ship was running three shifts a day—seven A.M. to four P.M., four P.M. to eleven P.M., and eleven P.M. to seven A.M.—with no time built into the schedule for delays, so when the delivery of a thirty-five-foot generator scheduled to go in on a Tuesday turned out to be delayed for two weeks, Jon Matthews had to re-orchestrate construction so that work could continue while still allowing a way to get the generator installed once it finally arrived.

  The first shift did the biggest and most complicated jobs, the second shift focused on detail work, such as production welding and painting, and the third shift served more or less as grunts—doing rough welds and moving materials from storage to the ship so that the skilled laborers would arrive at their stations in the morning with everything they needed already in place. Matthews worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, arriving by seven A.M. and getting home most nights after eight, which gave him only a few hours, plus Sundays, to spend with his wife and three children.

  It was a thriving miniatu
re city in the yard, with 250 engineers, twenty purchasers, and more than three thousand men working on physical production. Hourly workers loved the job; there was as much overtime available as any single man could handle. All the while, John Graham stalked the pier with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  The worksite and the ship were epic in scale. Once the derrick and docking legs were installed, the ship towered over the yard, the town, and the surrounding area. You could see the gigantic mining ship from all of Philadelphia’s bridges and from most any open point on the city’s east side. From up close, it was like working on a skyscraper—it took riggers fifteen minutes of perilous climbing, using ropes and stairways, with only two-foot-by-twelve-foot planks in some places between their boots and the deck two hundred feet below, to reach the top. The perch there was so high that some supervisors refused to climb it, and that made the derrick the ideal spot for young men to hide out and smoke a joint. The view up there, for those who did brave the climb, was glorious; you could see across New Jersey nearly to the sea.

  • • •

  John Parangosky couldn’t visit Chester. It was too risky. The senior program officer he sent as his proxy was a retired Navy commander, and his primary job was to keep an eye on Graham and the engineers. Graham, though, hated the oversight—hated any oversight. He began and ended every day with an engineering meeting, and Parangosky wanted to be sure the commander attended every one. Graham, though, took some pleasure in taunting Parangosky’s on-site spy. He would vary the time and location of those meetings so that the commander would often arrive late and miss key portions. When he confronted Graham angrily, snarling, “You treat me like a spy!” the architect laughed and replied, “Well, you are, aren’t you?”

  He wasn’t the only spy prowling the yard. The Navy sent three of its own active-duty officers to monitor the Explorer’s construction—two captains and another commander. Everything about the construction was supposed to look like a legitimate commercial venture, and the presence of these rigid military men gave the CIA security team fits.