The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  40

  So, Who’s Going?

  The debate over crew size had been ongoing for months by the time the ship reached Long Beach. With so many specialized systems, each one requiring backup personnel trained to operate them, plus the need to include experts who were prepared to handle all of the intelligence recovered from the wreck, the crew list could easily have topped two hundred. But in the end the operations team settled on a total of 178 men—the final number determined by the maximum capacity of the Explorer’s lifeboats. There were eight key positions in the ship’s hierarchy: mission director; deputy mission director; deputy for recovery; deputy for handling; deputy for exploitation; deputy for operations; deputy, technical staff; and ship’s captain.

  On most any ship, the captain is in command, but because of the nature of this operation, and the fact that this was a US government vessel, the captain would not be truly in charge. The mission director would run the operation. That job went to Dale Nielsen, a civilian physicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Bay Area nerve center of America’s nuclear weapons program.

  Nielsen was hardly just any physicist. He was a World War II and Korean War veteran who joined Livermore and was named founding director of that facility’s secret Z Division, also known as the Special Projects Group. The Z Division was created in 1965 out of Livermore’s Nonproliferation, Homeland Security, and International Security Directorate, as part of an agreement with the CIA to study the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

  Z Division’s primary responsibility was to learn as much as possible about Soviet nuclear weapons, so much of the group’s emphasis was put on detecting nuclear tests and sampling particles from those tests to analyze the specific types and power of the warheads.

  For the purposes of the mission, Nielsen was hired as a CIA contract employee and, like all Agency men, he was given a cover name. As far as anyone on the Glomar Explorer knew, the mission’s director was a CIA man of mysterious origins named Dale Nagle. That he happened to know an inordinate amount about nukes struck no one as odd.

  His selection meant that Curtis Crooke would be staying home, despite his deep experience on drillships and intimate knowledge of the Explorer’s complex systems. This was a gut punch to the individual who’d had as much to do with the Azorian program’s success to date as anyone, but Crooke was a proud man who didn’t easily cede command.

  Parangosky didn’t need to deliver this news personally, but he did it anyway, and he got exactly the response he expected from Crooke. The program office chief was either going to run the operation, or not go at all.

  “I have no interest in going out there to be number two,” Crooke said.

  Privately, he thought that the CIA was making a mistake. In his opinion, the Agency was putting too much of the control in the hands of its own people, underestimating the difficulty of the physical ship work and the extent to which it was mostly a drilling and salvage job—the kind of thing best handled by grunts and roughnecks, who should have one of their own in charge.

  Too many eggheads are great for imagination and not so great for operations. The engineers had worked almost literal miracles to design and build the ship, and certainly they’d be needed at sea to operate and fix complex systems, but having too many of them around—particularly with authority—was seen as extraneous, and possibly even detrimental, when it came to operations. An engineer’s tendency is to analyze and discuss and make solid decisions based on data, but in the case of crisis—when a system has gone haywire and the entire ship could sink if a decision isn’t made in minutes—they’re not always the best people to have around.

  • • •

  CIA operatives were placed in many key jobs, including all of the director slots, as well as other strategic positions, such as the purser—the guy whose job is to be aware of exactly who comes on or off the boat. That, obviously, was an ideal place for a security officer.

  Sherman Wetmore was offered a position as the senior Global man on the mission. And Wetmore, who considered himself almost as much a seaman as he was an engineer, didn’t even need to consider the matter. He would go, without question. His job on the ship was to oversee all of Global Marine’s engineers—but not the operating crew in the engine room or the marine crew run by the ship’s captain. Another Global Marine employee put in a key role was Leon Blurton, a confident, friendly crew favorite who was named superintendent of drilling, which meant that he was in charge of the pipe-handling and heavy-lift systems, overseeing the army of roughnecks.

  Ray Feldman, the Lockheed engineer who’d designed the telemetry cables, would also go. He was, he said later, “too young to know better.” Jim McNary would help run the heavy lift, along with “Electric” John Owen, a Global Marine engineer who was excited but also worried about the prospect of Soviet interference—a real risk made obvious by a life insurance policy that every crewman had to sign. It stated that under certain circumstances the mission could be considered an act of war, and if anyone on the crew were to lose his life under those conditions, Summa would pay an award to whoever was named as the policy’s beneficiary. Rumor had it that Owen learned just enough Russian in secret to say, should he be detained, “I’m just an engineer hired to work on the positioning system. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  To his own surprise, Charlie Canby was also going to sea. When the ship got to Long Beach, John Graham finally prevailed upon Paul Evans to clear Canby, vouching for him personally. So Canby, like so many before him, was summoned to the office of Paul Ito. Canby, who’d been involved in some capacity for more than a year, and had sailed the ship through the Strait of Magellan, had zero doubts about the mining story. Then Paul Ito blew his mind. “It was like learning the facts of life when you’re eleven,” he said many years later. “When your mom and dad tell you the truth for the first time.”

  That wasn’t the only surprise in store for Canby. Graham had originally chosen Chuck Cannon to be the naval architect on the mission, but Cannon’s wife, Harriet, objected. He’d been gone for long stints during ship construction in Chester, for ship trials, and on the West Coast delivery, causing him to miss a third of his eighteen-month-old son’s life. Graham’s next choice was Steve Kemp—his gopher at the port—but the Agency again refused to clear him. That left Canby, who’d been working happily as a ship’s plebe. By process of elimination, he was the last architect standing and found himself offered the job he was actually educated for. He was, Cannon later admitted, the best choice anyway, being a certified welder, mechanic, and naval architect who’d sailed in the engine department during the West Coast delivery.

  Canby loved the Explorer even when he was working as a grunt, but as the designated naval architect, he returned to Long Beach with swagger, his eyes now open to all of the spies he’d somehow failed to notice before. He immediately liked a cryptospecialist who worked in one of the vans that was off-limits to most of the crew, and when the man introduced himself, Canby asked if that was really his name. “No,” he said, pulling out a license. “This isn’t me.”

  The man explained that when any government employee—whether he was an Agency officer, a Navy man, or someone contracted to the Agency for the purpose of Azorian—arrived in LAX, he was met by a security officer and driven straight to a big apartment on Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach, where he would enter as himself and leave as someone else.

  One afternoon, Canby was called upon to consult with Jack Poirier, who’d been selected to be the security chief for the mission. His nickname among the crew was Grayjack, for the color of his hair and beard. Poirier was a devout Catholic and Korean War vet who loved poetry and had a calming influence on everyone in his presence. He spoke in a thick New England accent and told Canby that he and his officers had been working out a procedure for classified material that would accumulate during the trip—charts, photos, cables from headquarters, and so on. These things were too risky to store, since they’d
give away everything if the Soviets were to board the ship. The policy, then, would be to dump most of the paper overboard every day, by stuffing it into weighted wire baskets designed specifically to sink.

  But officers couldn’t throw away everything. Poirier asked Canby to help design a place to store a few key documents—including instructions for how to restart certain systems, and the cryptography keys. He wanted a large and impenetrable safe that could be padlocked. Canby listened patiently to the instructions and then told Poirier that this was a terrible idea.

  “It’s going to be like a cowboy movie when the guy robs a stagecoach,” he said. “You know that’s where the supersecret stuff is! So the guy takes out his .44 and shoots the lock off.”

  Instead, Canby said, he’d build them a secret tube, a fourteen-inch “magic pipe” that would come up from the CO2 room below, on the main deck, and would appear to just connect into the other pipes. They could drop in the documents, which would slide down into a false section, accessed if necessary by a small steel door. No one else would know it existed.

  Canby also took a liking to two Navy captains who were to serve important roles on the mission but who had little to do while the ship was anchored at Pier E. One was Harry Jackson, a kind, jovial man with a tremendous résumé. Jackson had worked at the Bureau of Ships, was one of the first officers in the Navy’s nuclear power program, and was a key contributor to the design of the Navy’s Thresher- and Polaris-class submarines. The year before Azorian began, Jackson led the search for and salvage of the USS Scorpion sub, lost at sea, and his expertise in sub design and structural analysis made him one of the program’s most valuable consultants, even if his steadfast adherence to Navy habits—such as storing his pants under his mattress each night to keep them pressed—was a constant irritant to Brent Savage. The other captain was Fred Terrell, a Naval Academy grad who served on battleships and then later commanded a diesel submarine division. He would serve as the director of operations. Terrell hated the beard that the CIA insisted he grow as part of his disguise, and would surreptitiously shave away a little more each day, much to the amusement of Canby, who was the ship’s unofficial barber. With days to kill, Canby and Jackson helped Terrell design the sailboat he planned to build after getting back, sketching it on brown paper that they unspooled on the deck.

  41

  West Coast Sea Trials

  JANUARY 1974

  By January, the schedule was in disarray and Parangosky was trying not to panic, an act of self-control that was increasingly difficult, as new problems arose almost daily. By this point, there was only so much time left for mistakes. Careful study of the weather and sea conditions in the area around the wreck site made it clear that the only period in which a recovery might be possible was from early July through mid-September. And the ship would need a minimum of fourteen and more likely as many as twenty-one days at the site to have a legitimate chance of success. That meant the Explorer needed to leave Long Beach by the end of June, or the entire mission would have to be delayed until the following summer. As far as Parangosky was concerned, the idea of maintaining the cover for another twelve months, while keeping all the contractors and key personnel on the books, was absurd. It was now or never.

  On January 10, while union protesters agitated outside the gates, the Explorer departed Pier E for the West Coast sea trials, in which several of the systems would be tested for the first time. Two picketboats bobbed in the water just outside the pier, but neither interfered with the enormous ship as it headed for the test site, 160 miles west-southwest of the harbor, where the ocean depth was 12,500 feet.

  The trials would focus on the pipe-handling (PHS) and heavy-lift systems (HLS)—which together were the linchpin of the entire recovery—as well as the readiness of the operators who would handle Clementine. Provided the trials went well, the Explorer would retract the pipe string, close the moon-pool gates, and head out on or about February 1 for Isthmus Cove, off Catalina Island, where the HMB-1 would be waiting to submerge and transfer Clementine onto the Explorer—completing the final step for mission readiness.

  Complications began almost immediately. Just outside the harbor, the Explorer stopped to run some quick tests of the PHS. The mining crew loaded a sixty-foot section of pipe and ran it through the automated system a few times to test its reliability. It didn’t go smoothly. The system worked, but it was buggy, and considering that the recovery itself required that thirteen thousand feet of pipe be moved, assembled, lowered, and then raised again with millions of pounds on the other end, the PHS would need urgent tweaking, and it obviously wasn’t going to be certified on this round of sea trials.

  Were time not an issue, the Explorer would have turned back to harbor for repairs to the PHS, but to do so would likely mean missing the summer weather window, so the PHS team was asked to begin repairs at sea while the ship headed for deep water to continue its tests.

  Then the real trouble began. The Explorer reached the deep-water test site on January 19, but rough seas and high winds foiled the crew’s ability to do what they really needed to do: flood the moon pool, open the sea gates, and close them.

  On the morning of January 22, the seas calmed enough for Curtis Crooke to arrive by helicopter and observe the test of the sea gates along with two very important guests: John Parangosky and Undersecretary of the Navy Dr. David Potter, who had also succeeded Bob Frosch as the second director of NURO. Several of the Agency’s engineers, including Director of Recovery Dave Sharp, were also on board to observe the Glomar Explorer’s subsystems, which they’d been discussing and designing for three years, in operation at last.

  For many of the men on board who weren’t accustomed to being on the ocean but who would serve on the mission crew, these trials were also a chance to get some sea legs. John Parsons was one of them. Sherman Wetmore was another. Like most of the engineers at the program office, Wetmore had been frantically busy during the design phase, but things had slowed down once the final ship preparations began in Long Beach.

  Wetmore and all the others who had no actual job on the ship during the trials gathered around the railing above the moon pool to watch a test of those enormous gates—each one measuring one hundred feet by seventy-five feet. From his vantage, it was fifty feet to the floor, far enough that the immense scale of those gates, which slid open on rails, was difficult to grasp.

  Outside, the winds had picked up and violent seas were tossing the ship around again. Had the whole schedule not been so far behind, the Explorer’s crew would have postponed the tests for calmer weather, but Parangosky’s urgency had infected everyone, and Crooke, as test supervisor, decided to go ahead anyway.

  First, valves were opened by hand and millions of gallons of ocean water poured into the room through twenty-four-inch sea chests. An hour later, the pool was half-filled with dark green seawater, and the opening of the moon-pool gates could begin. The ship, meanwhile, had begun to buck, and that bucking grew worse as the rocking created an enormous wave that surged back and forth inside the two-hundred-foot pool in resonance with the swell outside. Each time the swell shifted and changed direction, the wave crashed into the ends of the 183-foot-long docking legs, causing an explosion of ocean spray that reached up over the railing, splashing down onto the observers and the deck under their feet. Underneath the ship, the sea gates slammed into the bottom of the hull. The sound was deafening, and the feeling for anyone standing on board was that this wasn’t good, or right.

  Wetmore knew that Graham’s architecture was solid and would hold up. He’d actually anticipated this kind of stress on the ship. It was why the program office had flown the hydrodynamicist Jacques Hadler back and forth in the design stage—specifically to study the forces of that water on the wing walls. Still, standing there as a wave crashed back and forth, torquing the ship—so that the front half seemed to move one way, while the back moved in the opposite direction—was a frightening sensation. P
otter and Parangosky both looked terrified, while Crooke, who appreciated the gravity of what was happening, attempted to ameliorate the situation by remaining stoic, as if this were all normal.

  As the test continued, Wetmore himself began to worry. He didn’t understand why it was taking the operators so long to close the gate doors, and the answer was soon apparent: They couldn’t. The banging of the gates against the hull had damaged the drive in the aft operating machinery, causing a malfunction. Control of the rear door was lost; it would slide closed, but then water pressure would stop it before the two doors actually joined and were sealed by double rubber gaskets. Instead the aft gate kept opening and closing on its own, like a huge and very powerful steel mouth.

  To calm the wave inside the pool, the captain turned the ship astern, and that maneuver worked, causing a change in the gate’s momentum. The enormous gate, essentially a small barge, slid forward, then stopped, hung up on a gear tooth, just short of the forward gate. This left a three- or four-foot opening through which water emptied and surged up.

  A team of safety divers was on board and standing by in case of emergency. If they could get down into the water by the gate opening, they could hook steamboat ratchets to both sides and force the gap closed manually.

  None of the divers were enthusiastic about the idea. The violence of the waves and the unpredictability of the gate opening made it a perilous job. But two divers volunteered. One was Tony Acero, famous among the crew for his comfort with chaos and for the tattoo on his butt; there was a single M on each cheek, each one part of the setup for an elaborate joke that made no sense until he did a nude handstand, at which point the punch line was revealed.