The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Next, the Explorer would have sea trials, conducted in deep water just a few hours’ sail from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Late in the construction, Sun’s engineering office did some calculations and determined that the giant ship rising on the pier was going to be too tall to actually get to sea. The derrick—almost certainly the largest ever built—was about thirty feet too high to get under the lowest point on the Delaware River, where a high-voltage power line runs across the water. The solution, Jon Matthews determined, was to leave the top section of the derrick unattached. The Explorer would depart Chester with that portion lying horizontally on the deck, and then, once the ship was past the wire and under the Delaware Memorial Bridge, it would be picked up by Sun’s enormous floating crane and reattached at sea.

  The Explorer had an unusually large number of personnel on board for these trials: 203 in total, including 58 from Global Marine, and a small group of CIA representatives working undercover as consulting engineers.

  To the contingent from Sun Ship—which included supervisors, engineers, electricians, pipe fitters, and operating crew—the number of men who went out for trials was unnecessary. Typically, you’d send a handful of men, plus a few representatives from the American Bureau of Shipping, which assessed a ship’s seaworthiness before issuing the official certification.

  Old-timers from the yard who had started out building Liberty ships during World War II—at the yard’s peak during the war, Sun launched one ship a day—and who usually jumped at the chance to go on sea trials stayed home in this case. Many were uncomfortable with the Explorer, which they called “the Ghost Ship” because when they went into the hull, there was nothing there—just the vast moon pool, and even that had a bottom that opened up. To men who had grown up building large ships, something about the monster of a vessel just didn’t seem right.

  Once at sea, the crew ran every important system—propulsion, water purification, sewage treatment, air-conditioning, electrical and galley, and heave compensation. They ran the engines at full speed, then threw them into reverse to determine the distance the ship would travel before coming to a “crash stop,” ran the fire system, and stress-tested various pumps.

  To test the ship’s ability to maintain position in open water, the crew laid a series of transponders on the bottom past the thousandth fathom line and then fired up the station-keeping system—three bow thrusters, two stern thrusters, and a twin-screw propulsion system that, together, could hold the ship still within six feet of a fixed point for twenty-four straight hours. That worked, too.

  The final test, of the heavy-lift system, would be limited. There was no capture vehicle to attach, and no time to deploy the entire pipe string, but Graham’s crew needed to know how well the gimbaled platform actually worked. Could the platform be held still even as the ship bucked and rocked? The captain sought out rough water and, yes, the platform didn’t budge. It was so steady, in fact, that Matthews sent some of the engineers who weren’t used to being at sea, and who were suffering for it, to sit up there and stare at the horizon to stave off nausea until the ship reached calmer water.

  The tests were scheduled to run for seven days but finished a day early. They weren’t perfect. They never are. But while normal shipbuilding protocol is to take the discrepancy list from the tests, return to port, and fix any problems, that wasn’t an option in this case. The Explorer was needed on the West Coast as soon as possible, so at Crooke’s order, all fixes would be made during the voyage around South America, toward Long Beach, California.

  34

  Bon Voyage

  JULY 1973

  On July 24, only seventeen days behind schedule, the Hughes Glomar Explorer left the yard in Chester for the final time. The giant ship repeated its previous voyage down the Delaware, this time as a nearly final version of itself, and once again dropped anchor after passing under the Delaware Memorial Bridge, so that Sun Ship’s floating crane could pull up alongside and attach the upper portion of the derrick permanently.

  To mark the occasion of the ship’s sailing, Sun’s PR man John Jordan faxed a press release to the media announcing the departure of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, “a 36,000-ton experimental mining ship,” noting that “Sun’s delivery of the vessel brought to a close a new ship construction program that was heavily engineering oriented.” The release ran through the ship’s most impressive features and innovations and informed readers that once on the West Coast, “it will be outfitted with mining equipment fabricated by Lockheed . . . and the ship will then engage in a program of experimental deep ocean mining and testing of various mining systems in the Pacific.”

  The departure kicked off a new round of press, including a bizarre report in The London Observer that linked the ship’s intended path, down the coast of Latin America, with a rumor that Howard Hughes’s secret partner in the mining venture was Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza, who was said to be offering the “reclusive multimillionaire” a secret tax-free base for his mining operations.

  The first leg of the journey, from Philadelphia to Hamilton, Bermuda, served as the second sea trial, and Curtis Crooke flew in to serve as mission director. Crooke had begun the operation with a buzz cut and vowed not to cut his hair until the ship left the East Coast. By the time the ship was ready, his hair had grown so long that he was constantly having to tuck the bangs behind his ears. One of the last things he did before leaving California was cut it all off again.

  For the next week, first in shallow water, and then in deep ocean, the crew performed forty-seven different tests of the Explorer’s systems. When the ship was within eighty miles of Bermuda, three essential tests were done: the automatic station-keeping system got its first trial in deep water, six hundred feet of pipe string was deployed through the moon pool, and the gimbal platform was given its first operational test. All three systems performed ably. Nothing indicated significant issues with any of them, and the mood on board was so loose that when the moon pool was flooded for the first time, several crewmen dove into the saltwater pool and swam around, proclaiming the water “delightful.”

  All in all, the ship impressed Parangosky’s engineers. The major systems all seemed to work, and though there were many, many deficiencies to address, there was no indication from anything experienced in the sea trials that the Explorer or its critical components were not up to the task of raising the submarine.

  • • •

  Most of the crew hired to sail the Hughes Glomar Explorer around South America to the future home in Long Beach, California, was uncleared. These men were hired in the open, to operate and deliver an unfinished mining ship from its place of construction to the port where work would be completed. But they’d gone into the offshore oil and mining business, in many cases, for the adventure and the good pay. They expected to be treated well, and Global Marine didn’t disappoint.

  As a celebratory gift in honor of the Glomar Explorer’s departure from Philadelphia, a major accomplishment on the road to the actual mission, the CIA allowed Global Marine to charter an airline jet to fly the A crew, which would sail aboard the Explorer from LA, where they’d been training, to New York, where they’d refuel and continue to Bermuda, to meet the ship and begin the voyage around South America.

  The plane was stocked with steaks and alcohol and flew the rowdy bunch of roughnecks across the country on what one participant later called “a booze-filled orgy.” The party got wild and, according to one report, even involved the pilots, who were said to have flown the whole trip with the cockpit door wide open.

  By the time the jet landed on the East Coast, the plane was trashed, numerous men had puked, and when a head count was taken before the crew transferred on to Bermuda, one person was missing. It didn’t take long to find him. A search of the plane found the man, a twenty-eight-year-old bedroom steward—a BR, in shipping parlance—dead in the bathroom; he’d choked on either a piece of steak or his own vomit or bot
h.

  His parents, who knew only that their son had gone off to work on a mining ship built for Howard Hughes, filed suit, and the case—had it gotten into the courts—could have blown the whole cover. But the CIA, using intermediaries, settled. The terms and other details of the case remain a mystery, and almost certainly always will be.

  35

  On to Long Beach

  On August 11, with a new crew of ninety-six men on board, the Explorer left Bermuda to begin the 12,700-mile journey to Long Beach with Captain Louis Kingma in command of the marine crew, a CIA operative carrying Global Marine credentials overseeing the mission, and Chuck Cannon serving as the chief naval architect. It was a thrilling assignment for Cannon, made all the more exciting by the return of his old pal Charlie Canby, who’d joined the crew as an ordinary seaman and welder. This was a lowly crew job, but Canby was happy to have it and be back with Global Marine after quitting earlier in the year to work for a competitor. Canby hated that job and begged to come back when the Explorer went to sea, in any role the company would give him.

  The ship had been rushed out of the yard to meet Parangosky’s ambitious deadlines, set by a calendar that was disappearing in front of his eyes, and Crooke and Graham were okay with the decision because they realized they could take advantage of the lengthy trip to make basic repairs and improvements. Graham assigned Cannon to make engineering sketches and help Leon Blurton oversee the work of thirty men with a list of eighty jobs to do, including the installation of numerous small components, improvement of some of the ship’s temporary welds, and testing various smaller systems. It was, in a sense, an extended sea trial, and Cannon worked much of the time with a Scotsman from the contractor hired to install and calibrate the ship’s anti-roll stabilizing seawater tanks.

  The Explorer was still operating as a white vessel on this trip and had only a very small Agency contingent, with Brent Savage, the former cop, handling security. Savage could fade into any crowd, especially in the baseball cap he often wore, making him ideal as an embed on a ship that was supposed to be an open ocean miner. Savage wasn’t the friendliest guy, and he had little to do on the voyage, a combination that made him something of a nuisance for the crew. He chastised three embedded program officers who weren’t blending in well enough with the roughnecks, busted some of the engineers for swimming in the moon pool, which had partly filled with water due to leaks in the sea-gate seals, and confiscated Chuck Cannon’s film, after he was caught taking pictures of seabirds.

  The trip was expected to take fifty days, at an average speed of ten and a half knots, and would take the Glomar Explorer all the way down South America’s east coast, and up the other side to California. This was a long and difficult course that included passage through one of the narrowest and most dangerous shipping channels on earth: the Strait of Magellan.

  The weather was good—pleasant, warm, and with calm seas—save for a single storm that livened things up for a few days, bringing sixty-knot winds and twenty-foot seas. The crew settled into a routine, working in two shifts. Most men focused on repairs and tests and during downtime enjoyed first-run films and filet mignon from the HGE’s well-equipped galley, staffed by three cooks and two bakers.

  A grunt crew of mostly college kids—one of whom was Curtis Crooke’s eighteen-year-old son, Steve—had been hired to do basic maintenance as well as other menial jobs, like painting and cleaning. But not every job was so simple. The ship had numerous giant, one-thousand-horsepower air compressors, installed in Philadelphia and then lubricated before the voyage with PCBs, which immediately began to curdle the paint on the inside of the compressors. Some of the grunts spent nearly the entire voyage picking off those paint chips with dental picks.

  The Agency’s security team had debated the risk of including kids who, being in college in the early 1970s, were probably at least occasional pot smokers, and after a series of interviews decided that they were too risky to clear even for the ship’s white mission. When Crooke heard that decision, he was furious. He pushed back, urging Parangosky to stop being so conservative. And Mr. P relented, on the condition that Crooke give the kids a stern lecture about marijuana while in Bermuda. So he did. The kids sailed.

  • • •

  The Explorer would make just a single stop on the voyage, in Valparaíso, Chile, and what awaited the ship there was increasingly unclear. In the month since the Explorer left Chester, Chile had been unraveling. Socialist leader Salvador Allende’s regime was wobbling, and public unrest was growing by the day. Allende had ridden a wave of antibusiness, anti–foreign investment populism to power, overcoming covert American efforts to foil his election, and causing great concern within the US military and intelligence communities because the unrest brought Cold War worries over the growth of communism that much closer to home. Nixon ordered a series of economic sanctions against Chile, and various US groups and proxies worked behind the scenes to weaken Allende and encourage his generals to turn on him.

  A coup attempt in June 1973 failed, but bad economic policies and a loss of support from both the Chilean supreme court and congress had left Allende on extremely weak ground, so rumors of another coup, this one with the full support of the military and—according to rumor—backed by the CIA, began to swell. Demonstrations and protests broke out and continued throughout the summer, and as the Glomar Explorer moved down the South American coast, rumblings of a massive labor strike that would further inflame tensions on the ground caused the Agency to begin making contingency plans.

  If the ship was unable to enter the strait, Parangosky was given three options, none of them good: Hold position off the coast until the situation improved; change course and make a far more dangerous passage around Cape Horn; or reverse course entirely, heading east around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean, and finally across the Pacific—a trip that would add at least a month to the schedule.

  Fortunately, Parangosky never had to make that call, as the situation had stabilized enough by the time the Explorer reached Possession Bay, on the Atlantic side of the strait, on September 5. Global Marine’s representatives in South America had prearranged for two Chilean pilots to join the ship there and guide it through the 320-mile channel to the Pacific. Provided that all went well, the pilots would disembark in Valparaíso, Chile’s largest port, and the only one big enough to accommodate a ship the size of the Explorer.

  The strait itself wasn’t bad. Two pilots are required by Chilean law because a captain who doesn’t know the geography would certainly run into trouble, especially in the fog and rain that constantly hang over the channel. But with pilots who’d grown up sailing this tricky nautical passage that divides the Chilean mainland from Tierra del Fuego, the voyage is simple, and for the Explorer, those twenty-four hours were quiet and uneventful.

  Exiting the strait was much less pleasant. As soon as the Explorer sailed out of the mouth, on the afternoon of September 6, the weather worsened and a storm set in. Gale-force winds buffeted the ship and it heaved in seas up to twenty-five feet, forcing the captain to slow the Explorer’s progress from ten knots to just over one knot, the maximum speed at which the Explorer could safely move in those conditions.

  More concerning to Brent Savage and the ship’s small security team was that the situation in Chile had deteriorated and was worsening by the hour. On the morning of September 11, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup that quickly overwhelmed the weakened Allende government. The president remained defiant until the end, making a final radio broadcast from inside the palace at 9:10 A.M., urging his supporters to stand up and resist by yelling, “Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!” He then joined his detachment of bodyguards—known as the Group of Personal Friends—in defending the palace against a full-frontal assault by the military, including bombers, helicopters, and tanks, until it was clear the effort was futile. His options exhausted, Allende told his men to surren
der and killed himself before he could be arrested.

  The Explorer entered Valparaíso’s outer harbor on the night of September 12, one day after the coup. It was late, and the harbor was quiet, having been seized and then shut down by the Chilean Navy in the early moments of the upheaval. The plan was to stop only long enough to drop off the pilots and receive a resupply of provisions and parts that had been shipped to Chile in advance, but as the ship approached, the situation was very much in question.

  A half day’s sail down the coast, the Explorer’s crew had observed a small cargo ship flying a Cuban flag heading south and then, three hours later, a Chilean submarine in pursuit. As the Explorer entered Valparaíso’s harbor, a destroyer and a submarine cruised slowly past but left the ship alone. The bridge radioed to shore requesting a pilot to come guide the ship in, and when the Explorer dropped anchor, a small Chilean naval launch arrived instead. Two young men in uniform, barely out of their teens, climbed up the Explorer’s pilot ladder with machine guns strapped to their backs and asked to meet in private with Captain Kingma, who brought along a CIA rep, in the guise of a Global Marine engineer who was overseeing the mining work on board. After a short discussion, the ship was formally permitted to “take entry” into the port, and the Chileans skittered off on the launch with the two borrowed pilots.

  The other reason for stopping in Valparaíso was to rendezvous with a contingent of Global Marine personnel who’d flown to Chile with twenty-eight boxes of supplies and a bag of personal mail on September 7. Once in-country, the men cleared the supplies through customs and waited for six additional technicians from Honeywell and Western Gear who were flying in to join the crew. The whole lot of them had traveled to Valparaíso on September 10 and checked into the Hotel O’Higgins to wait for the Explorer’s arrival. They were at the hotel when all hell broke loose.