The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Acero dove into the water carrying the ratchets, and the second diver followed.

  From above, it was difficult to see exactly what the two were doing, and the crew stood there, transfixed. The difference in pressure between the inside of the pool and the water in the ocean below created enormous suction, and as soon as Acero approached the opening, he was sucked out through the gates. Up in the control room, engineers listening to the diver’s net communication channel heard and would never forget the guttural howl that Acero, maybe the toughest man on the boat, let out when he was pulled under.

  For a few seconds, the crew froze. A diving supervisor on the deck screamed at the other SEAL, who clung to a section of the intact gate. Then, as quickly as he vanished, Acero reappeared. As the ship dropped and the water surged up through the opening, he popped out, thrust back through the hole and into the moon pool.

  The other SEAL grabbed Acero and, with the ratchets in place, the crew pulled the aft gate forward until the gap was closed.

  • • •

  The gate failure wasn’t just a setback to the schedule; it was a very real sign of the mission’s risks—of taking an experimental ship loaded with untested systems and attempting the most daring act of military espionage ever undertaken, in the middle of the Pacific, in full view of the enemy. The CIA’s naval architect who’d been Graham’s chief counterpart on the S&T team, and who knew Soviet submarines as well as anyone, was so shaken by the experience that he removed himself from the mission roster.

  Back at NURO, the organization’s deputy and CIA liaison, Zeke Zellmer, recognized that this was a make-or-break moment for Azorian, a program he fought for and had shepherded for three years. He caught the next plane to LAX, where a helicopter was waiting on the runway to deliver him straight to the Explorer, where he met his boss, as well as Duane Sewell, second in command at Lawrence Livermore Lab, one of the country’s most critical and secret centers for nuclear weapons research. Sewell was there to assess the situation for the Lauderdale Panel, a small, influential group of private sector scientists that had become the de facto advisory board for all major scientific and engineering decisions related to Azorian. Sewell was a meticulous man, revered for his judgment, who installed safety practices at Livermore, where extremely dangerous testing was common, around a motto: You can do anything safely, no matter how hazardous it might appear, as long as you pay attention and get the engineering right.

  The presence of the two highest-ranking men at the organization that funded Azorian, as well as a key presidential scientific adviser, was a clear signal to Crooke and everyone else that this was the single most tenuous moment since the program’s inception. Zellmer and Potter needed to know what would require repair, how the team was going to repair it, how much those repairs would cost, and where the funds would come from.

  The failure of the gates proved to Zellmer and Potter what they already suspected—that the rush to get to sea in the summer of 1974 meant that some of the ship’s key systems would not be as refined as they should be. This increased the risk of failure, but probably not enough to justify a full year’s delay. That was the argument Parangosky made very persuasively when Zellmer voiced his concerns.

  Crooke personally led an inspection of the moon-pool floor and was surprised and also impressed when both Potter and Sewell—august PhDs and giants of American science—crawled down into the gate opening behind him to assess the damage to the steel plating caused by the gear teeth. They had punched massive holes right through the plates.

  When the ship got back to shore, Crooke felt compelled to blame someone, so he fired the ship’s construction supervisor and ordered a hasty review of the incident. As the naval architect on board, Steve Kemp was left to explain the failure. At three to four feet, the sea state had been technically within the limits set by Graham, but those limits were based on calculations and with no real-world evidence to consider. The fact was, no one had ever built sliding nine-foot-thick doors—each one essentially a barge—on the bottom of a ship, and it was extremely difficult to predict how the wave action at that depth would affect them.

  The water had been much more violent than he and Graham, who had tried to be conservative, had anticipated, so Kemp consulted with Charlie Canby and decided to rewrite the operating manual for the gates during the most critical period of operation. The period of time when the doors were in motion, no more than a couple of hours, was the primary point of vulnerability; therefore, they should be opened only in calm seas. Once the doors were open and secured to the ship’s bottom, the sea state didn’t matter anymore.

  42

  A Crack in the Facade

  JANUARY 1974

  As the Explorer labored back to port for urgent repairs, with only a short time to return to sea and mate with Clementine, a different crisis began to bubble up back in Washington. Seymour Hersh, the dogged, irascible New York Times reporter who’d won a Pulitzer for his exposé on the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, got a tip from a source late in 1973 that the CIA was in the process of attempting to recover a sunken Soviet sub and that the mission was code-named Jennifer.

  Hersh worked every possible intelligence source for confirmation but came up empty again and again until he happened to bump into a recently retired CIA officer he knew at a cocktail party in January. Why, Hersh asked the man, would the United States be trying to recover a submarine? The man acted as if that story was crazy. It couldn’t possibly be true. But as soon as he left the party, he called newly installed CIA director William Colby to say that Hersh was, at a minimum, on the trail of Azorian.

  Colby, in his early fifties, had been on the job just five months, but he recognized immediately that Hersh—a reporter known for being impervious to government power and influence—was on the verge of spoiling the Agency’s biggest secret, an operation six years in the making. He decided there was only one way to deal with Hersh. He had to confront him and negotiate his way out of the trouble.

  Colby was a veteran of the OSS’s legendary Jedburghs, a group of spies recruited to parachute behind enemy lines in the early years of World War II and wreak havoc, organizing resistance and blowing up roads and bridges. The Jedburgh motto was “Surprise, kill, and vanish,” and Colby was perfect in the role. A quiet, analytical man with a sharp chin and round, steel-rimmed glasses, his calm, reassuring presence made him particularly effective as a saboteur. He never panicked, and even though his arrival at The New York Times Washington bureau confirmed to Hersh that his story was valuable, Colby made no attempt to bully the reporter. For one thing, he couldn’t legally compel Hersh to do anything. Instead, he offered a deal. He explained that the operation in question, the name of which he could not reveal, was of enormous importance to national security and that revealing it now would foil six years of work and a vast sum of taxpayer money. But he also knew that he needed to give Hersh an out. If he would just sit on the story until the Agency had finished the operation, Colby would be willing to give him a complete briefing of the program details.

  Hersh, who didn’t have enough to publish anyway, agreed. He also wanted Colby to answer some questions about the CIA’s involvement with Watergate, the story he was really interested in pursuing at that time.

  Colby had defused the situation, for the time being.

  • • •

  By mid-February, the Explorer’s gates were repaired, and the ship departed Pier E for a second set of sea trials. The ship moved first into shallow water off Los Angeles to deploy and retract forty doubles of pipe string, totaling twenty-four hundred feet. That went smoothly, with only minor control-panel issues, so the ship headed toward Catalina Island, where it would rendezvous with the HMB-1 for a final mating with Clementine.

  The capture vehicle was hiding in the belly of the world’s largest submersible barge, which was already en route from Redwood City, towed behind a tug named Wendy Foss. The HMB-1’s stint in the Bay Area had been a mat
ter of curiosity for locals, who were given no specifics about the nine-story-high vessel that had arrived under the Golden Gate Bridge from San Diego. THE SECRET REVEALED. WHAT WILL BARGE DO? announced an above-the-fold story in the San Mateo Times on the day of the HMB-1’s departure.

  “We want to clear the air,” Paul Reeve told reporters in a phone interview from Summa Corp.’s offices in Houston. The barge was part of an underwater mining operation and contained a “mining vehicle” that he was unwilling to discuss in detail because to do so would reveal proprietary technology that would damage Howard Hughes’s competitive advantage. A UPI wire report said that the “football field–sized” barge had been outfitted “under top secret conditions behind a fenced compound watched over by guards” and was “apparently headed toward South America for an undersea mining venture.” The AP story quoted Redwood City fire marshal George Asvos, who’d inspected the barge, reporting that the vehicle Reeve mentioned was a “submarine tractor that can be released to comb the sea bottom in search of mineral deposits.”

  The 350-mile trip to Catalina would have taken just under two days in calm seas, but again, the weather was uncooperative, and sixty-seven-knot winds driving thirty-foot waves bashed the tug and barge, creating conditions severe enough that the crew would have turned around and waited out the storm in port were time not so fleeting. Further delays were not an option.

  On February 27—just a day behind schedule—the Wendy Foss pulled the HMB-1 into Catalina Island’s Isthmus Cove, in plain view of a beach packed with sunbathers and the dozens of sailboats anchored in the popular harbor. Local news reports had noted the arrival of the Hughes Glomar Explorer a day before, and swimmers gathered along the shore to snap photos of the enormous barge, which looked like a floating basketball arena, complete with domed roof.

  The cove was an objectively terrible location for a sensitive operation, but the extremely public setting fit Walt Lloyd’s cover story perfectly. Moving Clementine into the Explorer was an ungainly process—“like trying to mate a couple of elephants,” as he described it—and required a flat sea bottom and very calm waters. And those were exactly the conditions in the 160-foot-deep Isthmus Cove, twenty-six miles from the California coast.

  A small armada of escort vessels had arrived to participate in the operation, including three tugs, an anchor-pulling barge called the Happy Hooker, and several pleasure boats piloted by security staff whose job was to protect the perimeter, telling nosy boat owners to back off in the name of Howard Hughes’s privacy.

  The final mating was done after nightfall. Once the sun set, divers slipped into the water to activate the motors that opened the roof of the barge—which had been sunk and was sitting on the shallow floor of the cove—and were ready to fend off any foreign agents or curious tourists who might decide to scuba around these curious vessels. The Explorer itself was bathed in industrial spotlights, lighting up the cove and beach so much that an innkeeper would later complain to reporters that the popular local wild buffalo were scared away from the surrounding hills for weeks after.

  Inside the Explorer, Charlie Canby opened the moon-pool gates and lowered the ship’s massive docking legs through the hole and into the HMB-1’s innards, now exposed by the barge’s retracted aluminum roof. Controllers maneuvered the legs so that their keyholes were aligned with docking pins on Clementine’s strongback—actions requiring delicate control of enormous steel objects the size of dinosaurs. Once the two components were linked, the docking legs were slowly retracted, pulling Clementine up into the moon pool.

  The only way anyone could have glimpsed the elaborate claw was from under the water, but even that possibility had been considered. In anticipation of such an event, Walt Lloyd asked Manfred Krutein and John Parsons to commission a scale model of a mining machine that looked similar to Clementine but which, upon closer inspection, would have had other adornments, such as giant tubes for sucking up manganese nodules. If blurry photos of Clementine were to surface, the model could serve as a useful distraction, a much shinier object for the media to focus on.

  The process was meant to look defensive but not overly secretive. It had been described already in Ocean Industry magazine, using information “leaked” by Paul Reeve. “The mining vehicle is too large and heavy to be handled by the ship’s gear in a conventional manner and must be installed from beneath the ship,” the magazine reported.

  As soon as Clementine was inside her mother ship, suspended over the floor by the docking legs, the sea gates were closed and the process of pumping out the seawater began. This was also Canby’s job. The ship’s naval architect opened the valves and fired up the fourteen-inch-diameter pump, which started up fine, ran for fifteen seconds, and then died.

  The reason: Masses of fist-size squid, drawn into the pool by the interior floodlights, had jammed the pumps. The mating coincided exactly with an annual squid migration to the waters off Catalina.

  Divers cleared the pumps, but the problem kept recurring and Canby was exasperated. Then a clever solution was posed. The ship raised anchor and moved to deeper waters, where the crew turned off the interior lights, opened the sea gates, and activated bright lights that had been hung over the sides of the ship. The lights would, in theory, attract the squid to the waters outside. And it worked, leaving only the large and smelly problem of shoveling thousands of pounds of dead squid from the well. The smell lingered for days after.

  From Catalina, the Explorer headed back to sea while the HMB-1 was pumped dry and towed back north to Redwood City to await the mother ship’s return. The Explorer would next head farther out to sea, some sixty-five miles southwest of Catalina, ostensibly to test the roll-stabilization system. In reality, the location was selected because it put the ship just outside the boundary of America’s territorial waters, which was how Walt Lloyd and Parangosky decided to work around a pesky problem that had arisen: On March 1, commercial vessels in California waters were to be subject to a special inventory tax. To avoid the scrutiny of that tax, which could force a revelation of the boat’s true owner, they decided to skirt the problem entirely by being at sea.

  The ship carried out the test, broadcasted an open message from international waters declaring the test complete, and then, just after midnight on March 2, headed back to Long Beach for thirty days of rigging and preparation.

  For the next few weeks, the Explorer’s crew put the ship through repeated and rigorous examination just offshore of Long Beach. Every major system was tested and every part worked, sometimes, but almost never did everything work at once, and a small powerboat named the Colleen ferried crew and parts back and forth from the Explorer to Pier E, with key department heads flying almost daily to the program office by helicopter for debriefs with Washington.

  The clock was ticking, morale was fraying, and many of Azorian’s top engineers fretted openly about reliability, about system failures, and especially about rushing into a mission preloaded with complexity even in the best of circumstances.

  Curtis Crooke wanted to do a basic test of Clementine in which they’d attempt to penetrate the seafloor with the tines of the claw, just to see how well the controls worked, and to look for any flaws or weaknesses in the tines. But every time he raised the matter with Parangosky, Crooke was told there was no time for another test. The idea bothered him, though, and he kept at it until, after three or four requests, Parangosky shut him down. “I don’t have any more time to waste, Curtis,” he said. “Mention this one more time and you’re through.”

  At this point, the calendar was dictating most every decision. The final step before leaving for the mission was an integrated systems test that would require the crew to operate all of the various components required to complete the mission. Ideally, this would be done in the deep ocean, at a depth of twelve thousand feet, so that the rigging crew could deploy and retract a large amount of pipe, but there just wasn’t time for that. Crooke, after serious discussions with
the CIA engineering team, decided that they could accomplish a good enough integrated test in shallower waters. They chose a depth of twenty-four hundred feet, close to shore but adequate for operating all the systems. This wouldn’t allow anything close to a full deployment of pipe, but the reality, everyone agreed, was that a deep test wouldn’t tell them much anyway about the only thing that mattered—whether or not they could locate, grab, and lift a submarine three miles deep in the ocean.

  The Glomar Explorer was one of the most specific tools ever built, designed for onetime use, and to carry out a series of iterative tests would be of only minimal value while unnecessarily stressing the various components. In truth, there was no way to truly test it all. So why even bother? Either it would all work, or it wouldn’t.

  43

  Sub School

  REDWOOD CITY, APRIL 1974

  Beginning in April, every man on the crew was given a new order. Anyone going to sea who didn’t have a job that required him to maintain a specific position for the entirety of his workday was assigned to a group. And on a date arranged by the security staff, each group would fly commercial up to San Francisco and follow instructions from there.

  This was required of every man who might have flexibility on the ship, no matter his rank or job, and there was no hierarchy in the groups. Engineers were mixed in with grunts and government agents, just as they would be out at sea. For the roughnecks, it was some rare exposure to the spook world, and they relished it.

  Upon arrival at SFO, each group was met by a security officer who took the men to pick up rental cars, then led them fifteen miles south to Redwood City, where they were checked into a Howard Johnson under fake names—Sherm Wetmore, for instance, became a Wetstein. The men got a rare night off, which included access to a suite stocked with Agency-supplied booze, a perk, it was made clear, provided for the specific purpose of keeping everyone (but especially the roughnecks) in the hotel and out of the local bars.