The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  At six A.M. on September 11, the Americans woke up to chaos outside the hotel. Smoke filled the air and the streets were packed with military personnel, armored cars, and tanks, all mobilized to overwhelm any remnants of Allende’s regime. The hotel was surrounded and the phone lines disconnected, so that no guests could communicate with the outside, nor was anyone allowed to leave. For two days, the Americans were trapped inside the O’Higgins, subsisting on snacks, as Tom Williams, Global Marine’s personnel representative, negotiated with his local contacts to try to arrange some solution in the middle of a revolution. Somehow, despite a curfew, limited communications, and chaos in the streets, Williams arranged safe passage for the group and its supplies to the Explorer. Whether he had any back-channel assistance from the State Department or Langley was never revealed, though a week before the ship arrived in Chile, Parangosky called Crooke and told him not to worry about any news he might hear coming from Santiago. He wasn’t more specific than that, other than to say that the ship and its crew would be fine, no matter what happened. The joke among the crew, who’d taken to climbing the rig platform to watch the fighting on plains high above the city, was that someone on board called Howard Hughes, who called down to the Chileans to order them to let the ship go or he’d tell the Peruvians to invade.

  However it happened, the problem was resolved, and at three P.M. on September 13, the Hughes Glomar Explorer pulled anchor and set a course for Long Beach as revolution raged in the streets of Valparaíso.

  36

  Paint It Black

  LONG BEACH, SEPTEMBER 1973

  The Hughes Glomar Explorer arrived in Long Beach at five P.M. on September 30—fifty days, seven hours, and thirty minutes after leaving Bermuda. At an average speed of 10.8 knots, the ship had burned through 20,643 barrels of fuel, at an average of sixty-eight gallons per mile. As directed, the captain pulled alongside Pier E, just north of the gigantic hangar where Howard Hughes’s famous wooden plane, the Spruce Goose, had been parked for two decades.

  The ship’s journey from East to West Coast was the operation’s pivot point. Up to the arrival in Long Beach, everything (or most everything) had been carried out in the open, as parts of a commercial mining venture. The ship left Philadelphia as an overt (white) mining ship, but it would transition in California into a covert (black) vessel purpose-built to steal a submarine, and that also meant a shift in leadership. Parangosky told the engineering team, led by Curtis Crooke, to stand down and handed the program lead to his operations crew.

  A few days before the Explorer arrived, a convoy of trucks rolled up to Pier E and workers unloaded modular vans stamped with HUGHES on the side. The vans weren’t suspicious themselves; they were the standard-size metal containers you see on cargo ships or freight trains, but no one on the outside could get close to them anyway. The pier was off-limits to the public.

  Parangosky’s plan called for the ship’s conversion to take fifty-one days, an ambitious schedule for sure, but a realistic one provided there were no major complications. It wasn’t like the operations crew had been sitting around waiting for the ship to reach California to begin the conversion. The Explorer was designed to be modular, with the empty spaces that puzzled the yard workers in Chester, but which made perfect sense once the work began in Long Beach. Within hours of the ship’s arrival, a dockside crane was lifting the vans over the Explorer’s deck and sliding them into slots, at which point electricians would step in and connect them to the ship’s power.

  These vans had been prefabricated to a standard size (eight by eight by twenty feet) and delivered to contractors a year before so that they could design, engineer, and install the various components necessary for recovery and exploitation of whatever was found in the sub. Honeywell, Western Gear, and Lockheed had all outfitted vans with electronics and controls for their systems, the vans for handling nuclear material came from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, an hour’s drive east of Oakland, and the CIA’s own engineers built out vans containing all the spooky stuff.

  The ship’s nerve center would be a set of two control vans installed in an empty compartment on the upper deck of the deckhouse, while vans that had been prepared specifically to deal with recovery of intelligence from the sub were put in a row just forward of the moon pool on the main deck. There was a darkroom for processing photos and film, a van for careful drying of material, a van for ultrasonic cleaning and preservation of items recovered, multiple vans for decontamination of objects, including nuclear materials, a van for the delicate work of handling and preserving manuals and documents, a van for waste handling, a refrigerated van that would serve as a morgue for any bodies or human remains recovered, several vans for wrapping and crating any items of special value that would be shipped to exploitation facilities on the mainland, and a suite of rooms set up by Livermore Lab so that men on the exploitation crew could suit up for work around radioactive materials and then properly dispose of clothing and clean themselves after a shift.

  Pier E was secured for the conversion work. A towering chain-link fence topped by snarls of barbed wire had been installed around the pier, and any vehicle or personnel had to pass through a second entry manned by guards who appeared to be hired security but were really Agency employees.

  Off the pier, people were curious. The Explorer’s arrival had made news, and its association with Howard Hughes, attempting yet another bold, questionably viable venture, was bait for the media and the public. Yachts sailed into the harbor and cruised by the pier, sometimes with the rich and famous on board. Barry Goldwater, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a boat moored nearby. So did Curtis LeMay, the famous Air Force general who ran for vice president as George Wallace’s running mate in 1968. It was not uncommon to see John Wayne, chilling in shorts on the deck of his own boat, and the oil workers hollered when Peter Fonda cruised past on a yacht loaded with beautiful women in bikinis and offered the Explorer men beer, which they had to politely decline because alcohol was officially banned from the ship.

  • • •

  The crew that made the trip from Bermuda had done its best to patch and repair the ship’s many operating systems, but the Explorer was also sent to sea with the knowledge that it was a work in progress. And the ship’s arrival meant that Wayne Pendleton, who’d been twiddling his thumbs for months in the program office, was suddenly very busy.

  Pendleton was an electrical engineer and a veteran of the Oxcart program, where he worked on radar cross sections on the A-12 for EG&G, a defense contractor born at MIT that had been a major contributor to America’s nuclear weapons program since the Manhattan Project. Pendleton’s boss on the A-12 was Don White, and once Azorian’s program office was up and running, Parangosky ordered Crooke to hire White, which he did, putting the CIA veteran on Global Marine’s payroll as VP in charge of electronics. White, in turn, immediately called in his old friend Wayne Pendleton to help.

  As an engineer with high security clearance and a long history of working with the CIA, Pendleton was the ideal go-between for the mission’s most classified components (communications gear, for instance) and the ship’s engineers. When the Explorer arrived at Pier E, he would walk from job to job, assembling a wish list of parts and repairs, and then report back to the program office for design assistance and money. It was a never-ending process. With so many complex systems, most of them purpose-built from scratch and never tested, something was always failing.

  Messages pinged back and forth between Pier E and the program office, by telephone, teletype, or—for the most sensitive communications—via memos hand-delivered by the many staff members who traveled back and forth. Every day, a security officer was assigned to courier a package of documents, including daily reports, to the East Coast on a chartered plane, because Parangosky had begun to worry about the threat of hijacking, which almost overnight had become a popular activity for revolutionaries, roustabouts, and seemingly any young person w
ith a grievance to air in spectacular fashion.

  One of the biggest tasks in the Explorer’s conversion was wiring the ship up to its many systems and vans. The vessel contained a rat’s nest of wires that needed to be located, cataloged, and connected. And Pendleton knew right away that he needed more labor to get it done. Solving that problem wasn’t as easy as calling the local union and hiring some electricians. A Navy captain assigned by the Pentagon to observe the progress had recently stirred up trouble by complaining back to Washington that too many civilians were being cleared—each one, he feared, a potential security risk.

  If Pendleton was going to add workers, they’d have to be spies. A call went out, and more than twenty Agency “consultants” with high security clearances were pulled from various locations around the country and put on planes to LA, where security officers scooped them up at the airport and took them to nearby hotel suites rented specifically for the purpose of scrubbing personnel. Each man turned over his wallet and was issued false identification and credit cards in a new name, as well as new clothes and, if sight sensitivity was a concern, also a few changes to his appearance—a wig, some hair dye, occasionally a fake mustache.

  When the makeover was complete, they were dropped off on the pier and put straight to work. Pendleton tried to be accommodating and to lighten the mood, as these highly educated men—many of them engineers or scientists who were unlucky enough to have had clearance and been available—were handed grueling grunt jobs, connecting wires or adding filters in the ship’s bowels, often working for entire days inside of tiny passages filled with stuffy, stifling air.

  But that wasn’t the end of the indignity. Because they were undercover, the men weren’t allowed to leave the site. They had to live on the boat, sleeping in bunks or, when space ran out—because there were other crews at work on other projects at the same time—on the deck.

  Pendleton tried to keep a straight face when he found one such man up on deck, cursing and scratching his scalp like a flea-bitten dog.

  “Goddamn, this wig is so itchy I wish I could throw it overboard,” the man said. “But the security guys would kill me.”

  • • •

  Inside the control van, Honeywell engineer Hank Van Calcar installed what was, at least in the interim, the most important piece of new equipment on the ship. Van Calcar had been hired to lead development of the ship’s automatic station-keeping system back in Seattle, but once that was finished, he turned to a new project—a simulator that would allow Clementine’s operators to practice for the mission.

  Van Calcar had built simulators for missiles and airplanes and even for ship-stabilization systems, and he told the group that there was no reason he couldn’t do that for Lockheed’s claw.

  Eighteen months and a seemingly infinite number of flights and meetings later, Van Calcar delivered the simulator to Long Beach. It used a beautiful scale model of the wreck, cast in gold by a sculptor hired by the Agency, and a “motion manipulator” that was a movable array of miniature lights and cameras meant to work like a scaled-down Clementine, all inside a large box. That was all linked up to software that simulated motion, forces, and movement and loaded into the CPUs in the same console where actual capture-vehicle operations would be carried out.

  Van Calcar rigged it all up and commenced training sessions for the Lockheed engineers who designed the claw and would now drive it. He would let them get a feel for the controls, which were awkward and touchy, then add complications and contingencies so that the operators learned to expect the unexpected and would be prepared to act accordingly and find a workaround.

  Watching hour upon hour of this made an impression on Dave Sharp, the CIA engineer whom Parangosky had named director of recovery for the mission. Sharp fired his original deputy of recovery and handed the job to Van Calcar, who with three young kids wasn’t even supposed to go out on the operation. Van Calcar didn’t hesitate. As he later explained it, “If you had the opportunity to be on that kind of a mission, and be part of something as exciting as that, there’s no doubt in your mind that you would say, ‘Yes!’”

  37

  Strike!

  Some problems arise unexpectedly. Others you bring upon yourself. And when the Explorer arrived in Long Beach, Crooke made a strategic mistake that put the entire operation in jeopardy. He fired the working crew. Global Marine wasn’t a union shop and the company wouldn’t be using union labor on the Explorer, either, even for the most basic ship operations. Crooke assumed that when he dismissed the crew from the overt ship voyage—none of whom had been cleared—the men would grumble a little, take their pay, and then head off to other jobs.

  The plan had always been to minimize exposure on the white voyage by operating it under the program’s cover. For the purposes of that twelve-thousand-mile trip, the HGE was just an experimental mining ship being moved to California for final conversion.

  But the local chapter of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (MEBA) was already upset with Global Marine and Hughes for not hiring union men to work on the upcoming sea voyage, and when the dismissed crew took their grievances public—saying not only that they’d been fired without notice, but also that there had been no overtime pay and they’d been given shared staterooms, a violation of standard practice on the high seas—a labor action began.

  At first, members of MEBA merely set up a picket line in an attempt to keep workers off the pier and create a boycott that would force Global Marine to the negotiating table. But on November 12, the situation escalated.

  The small group of mostly peaceful men waving signs grew to a mob of more than one hundred angry protesters who didn’t just get in the way of workers arriving at the site; they physically prevented them from crossing the line. The protesters harassed crew and managers, including Agency personnel, and began to stop delivery trucks, as well. They scattered nails on the road approaching the pier and even, in a few cases, slashed tires of work trucks parked at the site.

  For days, work slowed and nearly stopped, causing an irate Parangosky to push the sea trials scheduled for mid-December back into January. Parangosky was furious with the protesters but also sensitive to the possibility that the situation could get much worse, so he and Paul Evans met to discuss options. They considered setting up a back channel to the union’s leaders, who could be cleared into the program and asked to help quell the rebellion in the interests of national security, but both men felt that there were already far too many people aware of Azorian, and there was no guarantee that the union even had the ability to kill the strike without exposing the story.

  The only solution was for Crooke and GMDI management to open legitimate negotiations with the union at the National Labor Relations Board, as Evans and his security team revised protocols for arrival at the site. All workers who weren’t living on the ship were instructed to meet at several parking lots away from the waterfront, where they were loaded into vans driven by security officers and taken to the site in convoys. Word was passed to the picket lines that these vans would not stop and the convoys would speed across the dock—everyone holding his breath that no agitator had laid out spikes or nails to pop the tires—and through the gates, which were opened only long enough for the vans to get through, and then locked immediately behind them.

  Azorian’s West Coast security officers were already on high alert, busier than they’d been at any point of the program so far. They had to manage site security, the constant churn of workers who came and went, and now a strike, while maintaining constant watch for Soviet spies or slips in procedure that could potentially expose the program. Brent Savage took obvious pleasure in prowling the docks in mufti in search of anything that might raise eyebrows.

  Everyone on the staff was under constant scrutiny, and the security team was prepared to act swiftly to eliminate any possible leaks, even before they developed. One secretary was fired after two staff members spotted a nude photo
of her in the window of a novelty shop. Another was removed after she was linked to the Symbionese Liberation Army. And then there was a local prostitute with a long history of servicing Long Beach seamen recruited to lure anyone she could befriend from the Explorer back to her apartment, where instead of sex they’d get a sales pitch from a union rep. This worked once, but when the two men who accepted her offer saw the union rep, they left immediately and reported the breach to a security officer, who asked many detailed questions, including the location of this apartment. No one ever saw her again.

  As if there weren’t enough stresses accumulating, Soviet merchant ships had begun to make regular port calls in Long Beach, docking for two or three days at Berth 10, four hundred yards across the channel, off the Explorer’s starboard side.

  Then there were the Navy guys. Parangosky accepted that the Navy was going to spy and meddle. Officers in obvious mufti had been regular visitors to the Explorer since construction began in Chester, and that didn’t change in Long Beach.

  To Parangosky’s chagrin, NURO’s first choice as mission director was a diminutive Navy captain named Chuck Richelieu, and Savage noticed him the moment he arrived in Long Beach with his deputy, a commander at least a foot taller, in tow. Each day, the two would appear in identical disguises bought the night before off the rack at a local department store: brown shoes, brown pants, brown belts, and starched shirts tucked in—the shirt seam, belt buckle, and trouser fly seam arranged in a perfect gig line. On their heads, they wore baseball caps, with brims as flat as pancakes.

  What irked Savage most was that the two career officers were incapable of acting normal. The big guy was constantly opening hatches for his boss, and when either of them spotted a cigarette butt or candy wrapper on the ship’s deck, he couldn’t help but pick it up and throw it overboard. Such was the overwhelming force of order in Navy men.