by Josh Dean
49
Hurry up and Wait
LONG BEACH TO THE TARGET SITE, JUNE 1974
Every man on the Explorer had a job to do, and with so many of the systems still works in progress, and only a very small window for the recovery, the crew had virtually no downtime. But when they could steal even a few hours, life was comfortable. A crew of fifteen cooks worked in the mess hall, keeping it provisioned twenty-four hours a day. At any moment, a crew member could stop into the mess and get a good, hot meal—rib eye steaks, lamp chops, burgers, seafood, as well as an array of salads, desserts, and freshly baked bread and pastries. For men who had only a few minutes, lounges around the ship were stocked with fresh fruit, nuts, candy, coffee, tea, and soft drinks. There was even a soft-serve ice cream machine. Two native New Yorkers had arranged for the cooks to buy and hide a large supply of bagels, lox, and cream cheese that they managed to conceal in the depths of the walk-in freezer—for a few days, until someone found the stash and word got out. In no time, it was all gone. The only luxury missing from the Explorer was alcohol, which was officially banned from the mission but could be found tucked away in trunks under certain bunks.
The feeling on the boat was egalitarian. Roughnecks ate with deck mates, Navy captains sat with mechanical engineers, and although it was obvious to the regular crewmen who the spies were, there was nothing intimidating about them. The only men on the entire mission who kept themselves separate were the mysterious mutes from the communications van, a quiet bunch of NSA guys who always sat together, at a table in the mess hall’s far corner, so that the entire room was in front of them and no one could approach without being seen in advance.
Men worked twelve-hour shifts with no off days, but there were activities for anyone who didn’t sleep the entirety of the time he was off. The Explorer had a game room, a fitness center, and a TV/movie lounge that had multiple showings a day of current-run movies from a library of nearly seventy titles that included a few pornos, one of which was Deep Throat, and even some subtitled foreign films, which the roughnecks hated and jeered. Workers jogged, sunbathed, and even played Frisbee on the helipad, which everyone called “the beach,” and built model airplanes purchased from the ship’s store, which they’d finish and then launch from atop the derrick, watching the miniature planes soar into the currents high above the deck, then drift away and crash into the surf.
For John Parsons, there was always something to fix or a meeting to attend. He often worked thirty hours straight, stopping to sleep a little only when his body finally developed immunity to the coffee he was guzzling. Parsons liked to walk around and visit the various sections, staffed by a crew that was wildly eccentric in makeup. It was, he thought, a seafaring version of the odd couple, only instead of two mismatched personalities, there were nearly two hundred. Roughnecks hammered on pipes with sledgehammers while Ivy League intel analysts worked on reports and, in the windowless control-room vans at the ship’s very back, console operators recruited from the Nevada nuclear test site stared at screens installed to feed in video images with the sole purpose of making these men feel connected to the actual action happening elsewhere on the ship.
To these controllers, ship operations appeared to be easy. They pushed buttons and things happened. It seemed automatic, and they were oblivious to the reality that the Glomar Explorer, the world’s most technologically advanced ship, was actually a greasy, human-powered machine held together by men who squirted lubricating oil on bearings and used brute force on systems just to keep them running.
One of the daily responsibilities of the security team was to be sure that the bulk of the classified paper generated was destroyed in the ship’s shredders. The most sensitive documents went through a specialized shredder that worked so well that the resulting paper scraps were essentially a fine powder of secrets that was dumped overboard after dark. But there was so much paper being generated on a daily basis that the shredders kept jamming, and the security guys realized it was sometimes easier to just rip the paper into tiny pieces by hand and then dispose of it the old-fashioned way—by going to the top deck and making it rain. This process worked well enough, with one exception, when an overtired team working the late shift made the mistake of throwing the paper into the wind instead of with it, resulting in a blizzard of classified confetti that blanketed the deck, and causing the poor security guys to scramble and clear the evidence before Jack Poirier awoke and lost his mind.
• • •
Contact with the mainland was limited. To help the crew feel connected to their lives back home, operators in the communications van got regular radio reports and published a daily news sheet, complete with sports scores, that was posted around the ship. This was how the crew learned that White Sox pitcher Steve Busby set an American League record by registering thirty-three consecutive outs, that the government of Ethiopia was overthrown in a military coup, and that a thief in Port Chester, New York, set fire to a bowling alley to cover up a robbery, and the ensuing blaze consumed an adjoining nightclub, killing twenty-four people.
Men were free to move around the ship as they wished, so long as they didn’t get in the way of the roughnecks, didn’t bother the captain and crew on the bridge, and stayed out of the CIA’s communications van, which monitored satellite intelligence, weather reports, and downlinks from the NSA “ears in the sky,” which were constantly listening to Soviet ship signals. The communications van was a COMSEC-cleared facility, laden with high-security cryptogear that was used as infrequently as possible, to prevent the risk of Soviets somehow hearing the suspicious chatter of encrypted signals from an alleged commercial mining ship.
When possible, the NSA techs used open commercial code with innocent text embedded inside. Members of the crew, especially those with wives and children, could send very occasional messages back home, and sometimes one of the techs would ask to use that message to relay some code, promising that the recipient would get nearly the same message the crewman had originally intended and would have no idea that it had been modified to hide information. The only way whoever was listening on the other end knew if it was coded or not was by the way the message was labeled. Certain keywords on the header signaled that there was a code inside.
When an encrypted message was necessary, special measures were taken. Back in Philadelphia, the NSA had helped install and disguise a powerful log-periodic antenna on the ship’s aft bridge to transmit and receive continuous-wave communications, which sent a signal over obscure frequencies and used gaps in the signals, comparable to the beeps in Morse code, to hide messages that only the person on the other end, who had a key to interpret those gaps, could understand. Encrypted messages had to be extremely brief, so that they were transmitted only for a very short time, and always on some distant, unused area of the spectrum that was never used again.
• • •
On July 4, thirteen days after leaving Long Beach, Captain Gresham slowed the engines to just a few knots as the Explorer approached the target site, which lay almost exactly at 40 degrees latitude, 180 degrees longitude. The position of the wrecked submarine was, in fact, so close to the International Date Line that there was some discussion on board about which date to use in the ship’s log. Since the voyage originated east of the line, it was decided to use that date no matter where the ship was sitting.
The Explorer was outfitted with an early satellite navigation system, housed in an enormous box that filled up most of a container, but it was still very primitive and could take a reading only a few times a day, when the satellites passed over. The captain knew the location of the wreck on his maps, and once the ship was positioned over the coordinates he’d been given, he sent a signal to interrogate a transponder that had been left at the wreck site by the Glomar II. That transponder had been dormant for more than two years, but it woke up immediately upon being pinged and sent back a reply, which meant that the four onboard hydrophones, one in each corner of
the moon pool, could begin communicating with it, too, providing the ship’s station-keeping system with the information it needed to center itself.
The sky was lightly overcast, and rain clouds stood off on the horizon, as—at 1:01 P.M.—the first acoustic transponder was lifted by a crane and tossed overboard to begin the process of laying out the long baseline system, a network of sensors that would allow the ship to keep itself on station automatically for the duration of the time it was at the target site. Each transponder was a four-by-four-foot steel box filled with an array of twelve-volt DieHard batteries surrounded with kerosene to keep the box from compressing under pressure. They were designed to sink to the bottom at a specific point, the position of which was checked against a fix from overhead satellite navigation and plotted on a chart. For the rest of the afternoon, the ship inched carefully around the area as five more transponders were dropped into the water in a circular pattern around the target location, fifteen hundred feet from the center point.
The transponders could be pinged every two seconds, but they were so far under the surface that it took each signal three seconds to get down to the bottom and then another three seconds to come back up, so really the ship got a fix on its position every six seconds, often enough for its station-keeping system to keep the Explorer virtually still over the target.
For the next day, the heavy-lift crew worked in thick fog to get that system up and running, while the deck cranes lifted a set of beacons off the deck by a crane and dropped them, as delicately as possible, into the sea. These would form a grid around the target that Lockheed controllers would use to position and direct Clementine from three miles above.
Ideally, the sea would have minimal swell during the recovery operation, so the onboard meteorologist suggested that no one rush during preparations, since calmer weather was a few days away. It wasn’t until July 8, day four on target, when orders came to start flooding the moon pool until the level of the water inside was equal to the level outside the ship’s walls, at which point the heavy steel moon-pool gates would become neutrally buoyant and could be moved easily into the open position. Once the gates opened, the massive docking legs began to lower Clementine from her perch over the moon pool down into the water.
A day later, they paused at one hundred feet to prepare for the undocking—the point at which Clementine’s three-legged bridle would be attached to the pipe so that the legs could be released. After that, Clementine would be hanging from the pipe alone, and the long process of lowering her to the ocean floor could begin.
• • •
Some of the most stressful, mentally taxing work on the ship was in the control room. Because there had been no way to test the capture vehicle in advance, there was tremendous pressure on Clementine’s operators. Hank Van Calcar had helped solve this problem with his amazing simulator, and during the many days when the ship was heading out to station and getting ready for recovery, the simulator ran nearly all day and night.
Van Calcar was a controls-theory specialist. He had asked the Agency to make a scale model of the wreck using the Glomar II’s images, and the resulting model was beautiful—two feet eighteen inches in length, and made of gold. The Honeywell software behind Clementine’s controls was shockingly accurate. If an operator wanted to move the CV forward, backward, or to either side, he simply put in a command to, say, move forward six inches, and the thrusters would fire, moving it exactly six inches. And Van Calcar’s simulator mimicked that perfectly—so much so, he noted proudly, “that you couldn’t tell the difference between the simulator and the actual mission.” Which didn’t mean it was actually easy to use. The movements required were so precise, and the margin for error so slim, that operators were constantly on edge.
They alternated stints on the simulator and found that the experience was frying their nerves, which meant that it was working. By the time a session had finished, the operator was often drenched in sweat, and after a few rounds, Chuck Guzzetta, the Lockheed engineer in charge of the controls, came over to Van Calcar and said, glumly, “I don’t like your trainer.”
The simulator, like all of the major systems, ran on the most sophisticated computers available at that time. For the capture vehicle, that meant two redundant Honeywell 316s, each worth twenty-five thousand dollars and carrying sixteen kilobytes of hardwired memory in four thousand eight-bit boards.
Just observing practice was harrowing, and to decompress, Van Calcar liked to go out on deck. He’d never really spent much time at sea, certainly not on a ship as huge as the Explorer, and every day he saw something that impressed or terrified him. Once, after dark, he was out in a thick fog when a big storm rolled through. He was standing on the edge of the boat looking one hundred feet down when a gigantic wave went under one side of the ship and came up the other side, right below him. It was so huge that it reached nearly to his eyeballs, and he jumped back in reflex, then watched it disappear off through the fog.
The ship itself was an awesome thing, and it took him some time to get comfortable with the idea that it wasn’t going to fall apart out there. When he stood at the back corner of the ship and looked straight out along its edge, he could actually watch the wing walls torque and twist in heavy seas. This was part of the design, he knew, but to watch metal bend was disconcerting. His favorite thing, though, was to climb all the way up to the crown block on top of the derrick and stand there, looking down at Clementine hanging inside the moon pool. The ship could be rolling and pitching, but if he turned his gaze and fixed it on the horizon, the feeling was of absolute stillness. The gimbaled platform and derrick, riding on those enormous bearings, didn’t move an inch.
50
Trouble on the Horizon
Life on the trip out was rarely dull. The Explorer, according to Electric John Owen, was a “maze of machinery and control systems that needed constant maintenance and observation,” and it seemed, according to one Navy officer, like there was a “thrilling experience” every day. The hydraulic system sprang regular leaks, the heavy-lift pumps jammed, the heave-compensation cylinders got dangerously out of sync, and a double section of the pipe string broke loose and was left dangling from the derrick, swinging erratically over the moon pool like a twenty-ton pendulum that could easily crush a man or men. Because the pipe’s motion varied according to the ship’s rocking motion, it did sometimes slow down, and a crew of roughnecks who’d grabbed steel cables positioned themselves to loop the cables around the loose pipes when they were at just the right place and speed. One of them, an amateur bullfighter, whooped and hollered as they pursued the rogue pipe, yelling that this reminded him of tussling with a bucking bull.
July 9, the twentieth day at sea, brought a host of issues—camera mounts on the docking legs had rusted and had to be replaced by divers; one of Clementine’s lights kept failing, unpredictably, which indicated a wiring issue; and a pressure transducer, installed to track the load on each of Clementine’s beams, failed. The next day, July 10, the forward well gate came loose and then one of the Lockheed engineers had a mild heart attack, causing the crew to scramble for a replacement who could take over his duties. The men on the ship, Sherm Wetmore liked to say, became comfortable with their failures. They weren’t confident that things would always work, but they were very confident that whatever broke could be fixed.
Two days later, on July 12, the weather went south, again. The ship’s onboard meteorologist, a retired Naval officer, spotted a prolonged disturbance heading their way in the data from the Fleet Numerical Weather Center back in Monterey. He predicted seventy-two hours of difficult conditions, including heavy rain, dense fog, and sea swells up to twelve feet. None of this was beyond the limits for undocking and lowering Clementine, but the high end of that prediction would create serious roll and make the whole process more difficult than it already was. Charlie Canby didn’t like it.
For the next twenty-four hours, the crew ran further tests and prepa
red for undocking while the sea outside pounded the ship. The constant heaving created giant waves inside the moon pool, waves that slammed into the well walls and the docking legs, causing spray that reached the catwalks above. It was, as a mate wrote in the ship’s log, “a maelstrom in the docking well”—easily the worst conditions inside the ship’s most vulnerable section since the moon-pool gates failed back in California.
• • •
Late in the afternoon of July 13, the seas began to settle, and a distress call arrived over the radio on VHF channel 16. The M/V Bel Hudson, a British cargo ship bound for Seattle, was seeking immediate assistance because of a sick crewman. The ship’s mess officer, who had a recent history of cardiac disease, was reporting severe chest pain and “felt that he had had another attack,” according to his mates. The Bel Hudson’s medic wanted to know if the Explorer—the only ship within hundreds of miles—had a doctor on board.
The Bel Hudson didn’t. She had only a medic, who had stabilized the crewman according to orders given by a doctor over the radio. He had given the man a dose of the coronary vasodilator Peritrate to help ease constriction, as well as an ounce of whiskey for good measure, but the man’s condition wasn’t improving. It actually seemed to be worsening. The man was reporting “severe constrictive pains” in his chest and could barely move.
A ship at sea is bound by maritime law to help another in distress, so Captain Gresham felt compelled to assist, and Nielsen agreed. Jack Poirier, though, was worried. This wasn’t a total surprise. One of many contingencies that Paul Evans had gone over with the team before it left Long Beach was that a foreign vessel could exploit maritime courtesy and pretend to have a passenger emergency to get some agents inside the Explorer. But it was most important to maintain the cover, and a mining ship would not deny assistance to a sick sailor. Poirier and his staff understood this. They ordered a sweep of the ship to clear any sensitive materials that might be in plain view, closed access to the ship’s more secure compartments, and asked the crew to go about business as normal.