The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Savage couldn’t take it. As politely as possible, he asked the two to join him in a small conference room near the ship’s bow, past the galley. There, out of sight of any nosy crew members, he leveled with these two esteemed officers.

  “You’re so blatantly Navy that you’re going to blow our cover,” Savage said. “You can’t do that.” He explained that as a security officer, he was trained to help people blend in. “Pull your shirt out of your pants. Screw up your gig line. Talk about beers and”—to the commander—“don’t walk around opening doors for him all the time!”

  38

  Graham Gets Sick

  FALL 1973

  Strikes and delays weren’t the only problems hanging over Pier E. John Graham’s health, never excellent, was deteriorating rapidly. Azorian’s chief architect had learned to live with emphysema. It was, for him, an uncomfortable but tolerable trade-off for the incomparable pleasures of nicotine. But the relentless pressure of three years of nearly nonstop work had elevated his already impressive smoking habit to a level that defied possibility. Throughout the ship’s design, construction, and testing, Graham basically lit each new cigarette with the burning end of the last one, and his office and car were stacked with extra cartons of smokes.

  Just before Labor Day, Graham began to exhibit signs that something else was wrong. His wife, Nell, noticed it first. Her seemingly tireless husband had begun to take vitamins, and also naps. He brushed her concerns aside, saying it was probably just pneumonia, and at first Graham’s doctor agreed, prescribing only antibiotics and rest.

  Graham was fundamentally incapable of resting, a condition exacerbated by the realities of a project that was, to him, the culmination of his already impressive life’s work. To no one’s surprise, Graham tried to power through his problems. He showed up to the pier just as early, and stayed as late as necessary, but his declining health was obvious to anyone who worked with him.

  As his lungs failed him, Graham’s energy sagged, too. It became too much for him to walk up the gangway to the ship, and he asked Steve Kemp, the young architect who’d been ably calculating the Explorer’s weight and centers with no knowledge of the ship’s true purpose, to serve as his gopher in Long Beach. He also asked his secretary, Laura Crouchet, to locate and book a nearby motel room for an indefinite period, so that there was a place nearby to take an afternoon siesta when his energy flagged.

  Kemp, a nonsmoker, moved into Trailer No. 1 along the pier, which housed Graham and Crouchet. He sat at a round table in the middle between their two desks, underneath a thick cloud of smoke, and did whatever Graham needed him to do.

  Questions arrived at the trailer and Graham would dispatch Kemp with his answers, or on a mission to wander the ship, asking the various departments to think of anything that they might need from the architects. Kemp spent much of his time in the engine room, with the chief engineer, Gene Coke. They installed a set of overhead rails with trolleys and high-capacity chain falls so that if (and when) any of the five massive diesel engines blew a piston or cylinder, they’d have a way to pull it out and get a new one installed.

  When a request came down to move thousands of gallons of highly toxic hydraulic fluid, Kemp went to go look for a pump. Graham stopped him first. “Tell me what you know about pumps,” he said.

  “I don’t know a lot,” Kemp replied sheepishly.

  “Come here,” Graham said, and gestured at the chair next to his desk, where he often taught the young architect things he hadn’t learned in school. For ten minutes, Graham offered an impromptu lecture on pumps, and then said, “You need an explosion-proof submersible electric pump for that job.”

  Graham knew that Kemp wasn’t cleared, and he managed to conduct the final ship preparations, with Kemp as his envoy, without tipping any secrets. Kemp, however, was suspicious. He still had never been shown plans or pictures of the mining machine. And there were many men in plaid pants and sunglasses who weren’t the kind you typically see around ships. He was told they worked for Howard Hughes.

  Kemp was in the engine room when a call came down that the air-conditioning wasn’t working up on the superstructure deck, a restricted area that he’d never visited. The chief engineer told Kemp to come along, and when they got to that level, where a series of vans had been parked, he was surprised to see an array of electronics and TV screens.

  “Who are you?” a man asked, surprising them.

  Coke explained that he was the engineer and Kemp was a naval architect working for John Graham.

  “Well, he doesn’t have a red badge,” the man said. “He can’t be in here.”

  • • •

  Eventually, Graham’s breathing became so labored that Nell insisted he go back to the hospital, and doctors admitted him. This came at an inopportune moment. The accumulation of systems and equipment, tons upon tons of gear, was shifting the ship’s center of gravity, and the issue was stressing Graham out. The Explorer’s stability had been his greatest worry from the beginning, and he knew there was little margin for error.

  Graham barked orders at Kemp from his hospital bed. He wanted the ship’s center of gravity tested again using what’s called an “inclining experiment,” and if the result was unsatisfactory, it would be Kemp’s job to fix it. The result was unsatisfactory. The Explorer’s center of gravity had shifted up. In fact, Kemp calculated, when the moon-pool gates were open, and the derrick was loaded with pipe, the center would be so high that the ship could become unstable and roll beyond the seven-degree limit.

  Kemp was twenty-six and in a job he adored, a job he was in no way qualified for, but he wasn’t going to blow it, either, not if he could help it. He walked around the ship and looked at drawings and consulted with other engineers in search of a solution, until he finally had an idea.

  The ship’s massive docking legs—which would reach below the ship’s bottom through the open moon-pool gates and grab the CV once it was within one hundred feet of the ship’s bottom—had “rat holes” (or empty gaps toward the bottom) that were filled with freshwater. Kemp calculated that if he could replace that water with drilling mud, which was three times as dense as water, he could add 180 tons to each leg. Then, when the gates were open, the heavy legs, with extra density at their ends, could be manuevered into position and thus dropped into the ocean to lower the ship’s center of gravity during the point at which it was most top-heavy. The math worked out. Problem solved.

  Graham was thrilled.

  • • •

  The declining health of Azorian’s key architect cast a pall over everyone in the program, especially at the Tishman Building and on the pier. But it probably hit John Parsons hardest. Parsons was both disciple and son-in-law, and he was watching his wife’s father fall apart in a way that she couldn’t, since as soon as he got out of the hospital, Graham went right back to work and was too busy finishing preparations on the ship to get away and see his family.

  Really, though, not even Graham was aware of the severity of his condition. He acknowledged that he felt weak, but it came as a terrible surprise when he went to see physicians at a hospital in Newport Beach and was diagnosed with oat-cell carcinoma in his lungs—a particularly fast-growing cancer that, because it had already spread out of the lungs, was most likely incurable. His wife and kids were in the room as the oncologist delivered the news, and when his son Jack, a doctor in his final days of residency, heard the words he slid down the wall and onto the floor in shock.

  “This is it for Dad,” he told his sister Jenny. “He’s going to die.”

  Ever a pragmatist, Graham took the news and went home, vowing to beat the disease. Nell drove him to the cancer center for chemo every week, and he loved the place, which was filled with friendly people, including many beautiful nurses who tolerated his flirting and paid him lots of attention in return. And his strength did improve. Graham even did something no one thought possible: He quit sm
oking. It was one of the hardest things he did in his life, but he went cold turkey, and it actually stuck—for a while.

  For a man with terminal cancer, Graham struck everyone as surprisingly upbeat. Had the Explorer’s architect been healthy, he might even have been talked into going out on the mission, but it became increasingly clear in the months before departure that he would be in no shape to do so.

  In fact, Graham decided, the most important thing he could do was focus what energy he still had on his health. His most critical work on the ship was finished anyway, and he had dozens of capable men under him, so when Graham told Crooke about the cancer, he said he was going to step away from the program.

  From a bed at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Graham dictated a letter by phone to Laura that was delivered to all of his engineers and the Azorian hierarchy. “My dear friends and associates,” it began. “It is kind of a shock for me to have to write this letter, but, I would rather you know all the facts, and, you can count me in or out of future planning for Global Marine. Last Sunday, I was admitted to Hoag Memorial Hospital in Newport Beach, where my illness was quickly diagnosed as milignant [sic] lung cancer. In the next 8 days, we have been trying to find the exact extent and type of this cancer, and, thus far have seen nothing to positively state that it is incurable.”

  He went on to say that when the specialists at Hoag had finished studying his charts, a second team from UCLA would be consulted. “Obviously, I will be totally concerned with this No. 1 problem for some time. The most optimistic time would be 3 months for recovery and conjecture as to the worst is anybody’s guess. I called Curtis Crooke and told him that I was totally, completely, and irrevocably finished with the Deep Sea Mining Project. Under no circumstances will I return to this program, except as a consultant with no responsibility or official capacity.”

  If he was “fortunate enough to recover from this problem,” Graham continued, he would be happy to take on new projects in the future. But in the meantime, he wanted to make sure “the massive amount of technical files” he had accumulated in his sixteen years at Global Marine were collected and sorted. Even in this, his letter of resignation from Azorian, Graham couldn’t pass up a chance to point out inferior work. “I have never been impressed with the central filing system Global Marine has had in the past and I would like to think that we could do better.” He asked that Laura be able to spend “all her time on this effort for a period of at least 6 months, or until the job is finished.”

  For a time, the treatments worked. Graham’s energy returned. He got stronger and would even work in the garden, tending to his roses. Then, in the spring, he felt pain in his back. The cancer had returned and was on the move. It had spread into his bones and was more than likely heading toward his brain, too. Graham was strong enough to attend his daughter Callie’s wedding in Palm Springs in March, but he was in considerable pain. By April, he was smoking again.

  39

  We Need a Crew

  Secret agents, undercover Navy captains, and mechanical engineers would comprise just part of the Glomar Explorer’s population. They were actually the minority. The majority of the men on the crew would be manual laborers who made the ship and its mechanical systems work. These were blue-collar men, mostly from the South and lower Midwest, where the American oil industry was based—roughnecks and good ol’ boys who worked months at a time on drill rigs or at remote oil fields and began to show up at the Tishman Building in the spring of 1974 to apply for exotic, high-paying work on a mysterious mining ship that was the worst-kept secret in the industry.

  GMDI’s primary recruiter for the crew was Wayne Collier, better known as Cotton. A former undercover narcotics officer for the Justice Department in the Deep South, Cotton had also worked as an oil field roughneck and a steelworker. He arrived in LA in early 1974 and spent the first month absorbing what he could about the mining project while often wondering why so many of the engineers acted as if they were protecting a state secret—as well as why the office’s cabinets were all secured with heavy-duty locks and meetings were often held behind closed doors.

  Six weeks into his new job, Cotton was called to the Hughes building, where he was led into the office of Paul Ito.

  Cotton knew Ito only by voice, as the man who approved all personnel decisions for the mining project. He was a stylish, stone-faced Japanese American with a pressed suit and hair the color of fresh tarmac. Ito didn’t smile as he shook Cotton’s hand and pointed him to a chair opposite his desk. He then sat down himself and beckoned his secretary on the intercom.

  “Bring me six cups of coffee, please, and hold all calls,” he said. Ito told Cotton he was about to receive a detailed briefing on the secretive Hughes operation and asked him to save his questions until he was finished. “All will be answered,” Ito said.

  Ito talked for hours, or that’s how it felt, pausing only to swig coffee. He laid out the history of the Hughes company’s interests in mining, as well as the structure and detailed roll-out plans for this experimental and speculative venture, which would establish an entirely new industry. He explained why Global Marine, the world’s leader in deep-water drilling, had been chosen to build the mining ship, and showed Collier samples of the manganese nodules that would be suctioned from the seafloor and processed to access the rare valuable metals inside. Samples of these oblong black rocks, the size of fingerling potatoes, sat on his desk. He handed one to Cotton, who passed it from one hand to the other. It looked and felt like volcanic basalt, only lighter.

  Cotton’s eyes were about to cross from the deluge of detail when Ito stopped and fixed his gaze on the man who would recruit the men who would run the mining machines.

  “Have you been paying attention?” he asked.

  Cotton nodded.

  “What you’ve heard about our plans is a complete lie,” he said. “Mining is not our business. We are going to recover a sunken Russian submarine, and you are actually working for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  There were actual Hughes employees at the program office. The cover story depended on that. But Ito wasn’t one of them. He was a security officer hired to represent the CIA, inside the program, and charged with making sure every man hired was honest and trustworthy. Cotton, then, would be one of his most critical employees. As the guy who would hire the rugged men required to operate the ship and its equipment, he needed to find talented, experienced people who he was also certain would never reveal a word about the ship’s true purpose. Ito told him that the CIA actually preferred men from the American South, who were considered to be more loyal, patriotic, and easy to clear.

  Cotton placed ads in industry publications, and red-blooded roughnecks, many with southern accents as thick as sausage gravy, poured into LA. Aspiring pipe fitters, ironworkers, and crane operators were told they’d play a part in starting a new industry and would be working on the most advanced drillship ever built. Cotton handed applicants samples of the nodules pulled up by the Glomar II, allowing them to feel what they’d be seeking out. If a particular candidate seemed good enough to undergo further scrutiny, Cotton would offer twenty-five dollars in good-faith holding money to keep the man from taking another job while the CIA security team ran background checks, which he explained were personally ordered by Howard Hughes.

  He hired nearly 150 men—75 each for the A and B crews—and each time a new hire was cleared, Cotton escorted him over to the DOMP office to receive an abbreviated version of Ito’s famous briefing, sometimes delivered by one of the other security officers who worked in “human resources,” often Howard Imamura. Then they were taken to the LA Airport Medical Center, across the street from Tishman, for a mandatory physical.

  These, Cotton later wrote, were “men of true grit,” recruited for their reliability, expertise, and patriotism. They had nicknames like Curley, Cowboy, Bimbo, and Big John and came from places like Bridge City, Texas; Brookhaven, Mississippi; Shreveport
, Louisiana; Millry, Alabama; and Little Rock, Arkansas. The ideal man was, according to Cotton, “patriotic, loyal, flag-saluting, apple-pie-eatin’, mother-lovin’, tobacco-chewing and he swallowed the juice.”

  • • •

  Clearing so many men was onerous work for the security group. An arrest or two, especially for minor crimes, was forgivable, but a surprising number of applicants had been jailed eight, nine, ten times, often for drunk and disorderly, a pattern of being reckless in public that the CIA obviously couldn’t tolerate.

  A background check wasn’t entirely science. To some degree, a CIA security clearance was up to an officer’s gut feeling. Often the best way to build loyalty was to put the responsibility directly into that person’s hands in terms as blunt as possible. As Walt Lloyd explained it, “You tell them, ‘You’re carrying the goddamn subject that will get us into war. How are you going to treat it?’” The CIA called it “the team spirit approach.”

  The trickiest part of Cotton’s job was hiring divers. The mission required sixteen highly experienced divers, far more than a typical drillship would need, meaning that the number itself was potentially a security risk and had to be kept secret. To cover his tracks, Cotton was instructed to hide the divers in other jobs and to cover the paper trail, so they weren’t hired directly by Summa. A subsidiary called Oceanus was set up exclusively for this purpose.

  Applications for the diving jobs came to Cotton’s desk in batches and were often fishy. Some names were clearly faked, and he began to notice identical information—education, references, work history—repeated over and over. When Collier told Ito this concerned him, that it was an obvious red flag if anyone should decide to audit the files, he was told not to worry about it and to keep those personnel files locked away separately. Almost certainly, he later decided, this was because they were all Navy SEALs.