by Josh Dean
Early the next morning, Poirier and Nielsen convened an urgent meeting with the ship’s doctor, James Borden, to discuss how they might handle their reaction. A short visit wasn’t a big concern; it wasn’t that difficult to get a man onto the ship and into the hospital without his getting anywhere near the moon pool, nor would it seem suspicious to avoid that area. But what if the man’s condition slipped to a point where he had to stay under medical supervision? A permanent stowaway was definitely not something the security team could or would risk.
As a first step, the Glomar Explorer offered to send over a medical team. So the Bel Hudson—which had stopped about one-third of a nautical mile off the port side of the Explorer—dropped a lifeboat into the water and picked up Borden, a medical technician, and Poirier, who was introduced as an “administrative officer.”
By the time the men had reached the British ship, the patient had deteriorated into a state of “semi-delirium.” Borden checked his vitals, took his blood pressure, and determined that the seaman wasn’t in cardiac failure. He was clearly in distress, however, and Borden couldn’t say for sure what was wrong with him. He decided that to be safe the man needed to be transferred back to the Glomar Explorer for further testing, including a chest X-ray, and observation.
This was easier said than done. The patient was in no shape to move very far, and the weather had worsened, kicking up into a squall. It took the group of them to load the man into the lifeboat, and as the deck crew lowered it into the water, the Bel Hudson rolled and bucked.
It was even worse on the other end. Borden and his men had climbed down a rope ladder to reach the skiff, but the patient was far too weak to ascend a rope ladder. The only way to get him up to the Glomar’s deck, seventy-five feet above, was to strap him into a stretcher and use a deck crane, typically used for loading cargo and heavy equipment, to lift it. Massive loads are what the crane’s operator was accustomed to feeling on the other end, and a man on a stretcher felt practically weightless in comparison, so it would have been difficult enough for the operator to make a gentle lift under ideal circumstances. But with the seas churning, the stretcher bounced several times off the ship’s side as it ascended and finally reached the deck, where the crane operator deposited the litter with a thud. If the man hadn’t been feeling terrible before, he was then.
Borden wheeled the patient to the hospital on a gurney, with the Bel Hudson’s second mate following behind with Poirier. He was given a chest X-ray, and as soon as Borden slipped the print onto the wall-mounted illuminator, he recognized the problem: This wasn’t a cardiac condition at all; the man had three broken ribs.
“How did you get broken ribs?” he asked.
The man stared back, perplexed. He had no idea. He had just woken up in horrible pain, and considering his history, the medic assumed it was a heart attack.
Poirier looked at the second mate. Did he have any idea what happened?
Well, the mate replied, there was something. He, the captain, and the mess officer had been drinking heavily in the wee hours with “some girls” when the other two men got into an argument. Recognizing trouble, he rushed the girls out of the room, he said, and didn’t see what happened next. He found the mess officer “out cold” on the deck in the morning, and when the man woke up, he immediately clutched his chest and groaned with pain. Most likely, either the captain broke the man’s ribs in the fight, or he stumbled out of the room and fell, breaking them that way.
Broken ribs hurt—a lot—but the man’s health was clearly not perilous, so Poirier wanted him off the Glomar and back on the Bel Hudson as quickly as possible.
Dr. Borden wrapped the patient’s chest in tape, doubling up around the sixth rib, where the worst break was, gave him Xylocaine and codeine for the pain, then sent him back to the top deck, where the man saw the stretcher being prepped to lower him back to the lifeboat and experienced a sudden renewal of vigor. He felt fine, he said, to climb down himself. By five fifteen P.M., the lifeboat was back, with a box of Scotch whiskey on board as thanks, and the Bel Hudson sailed off toward Seattle, with a batch of the Explorer’s mail in the hold. That night, every man on the crew got a single finger of whiskey as he arrived for dinner, poured by Poirier.
And then it was back to work. Preparations for the salvage could begin again.
51
Here Comes Trouble
Clementine’s trip to the bottom and back should have taken two days. It took two weeks. The problems were frequent and many, and the engineers assigned to the pipe-handling and heavy-lift systems ran from one fix to another, as the mission command group watched the days tick away while worrying about the constant threat of Soviet ships on the horizon.
Weather, though, was the biggest issue. Sea swells reached thirteen feet, which was more than the ship’s systems were designed to handle, so for days on end, the mission froze, with Clementine dangling one hundred feet under the ship at the end of the pipe string, where it, too, was battered. Every day, the divers would be sent into the water to fix something—a light, a camera, a weld—and the work was so frequent that three of the four underwater welding torches broke.
On July 15, day twenty-six, the weather calmed, but only temporarily, as Tropical Storm Harriet spun up a few hundred miles away. The crew used this break to pull Clementine back into the well, so that they could more easily do repairs to both the claw and the docking legs.
The ship’s log was filled with a litany of malfunctions, cracks, leaks, and “abnormal operational inconsistencies,” not to mention fog, mist, rain, and wind. Nonetheless, by the morning of July 18, day twenty-nine of the mission, the crew had welded, patched, and jerry-rigged the various faulty parts to a point at which the mission director felt confident enough to proceed. Better yet, the weather was improving. After days of heavy seas, driven by distant storms, the ocean calmed and on the eighteenth the onboard forecaster predicted calm seas and the imminent arrival of a high-pressure system that would keep conditions mild for at least a few days. “We should expect some stable good weather!” Sherm Wetmore scrawled in the heavy-lift log. The plan was to be ready to begin flooding the well at midnight that night.
There was just one small hitch: At 9:06 A.M., the Explorer’s radar picked up an “unidentified vessel continuously maintaining station” one and a half to two and a half miles out. There was no way to make a visual identification through the fog, but the ship appeared to be circling, and it made no attempt at contact. This was unnerving activity, not at all normal for a ship.
Nielsen told the crew to maintain radio silence while continuing with preparations for the undocking, later that afternoon. Around three thirty, the fog lifted, and there the ship was—not even a half mile off the Explorer’s starboard side. The vessel was white with no obvious markings or flags, but it had a spiky Mohawk of antennas that looked to naval analysts like the kind used for missile tracking. There was also a helicopter on a pad near its stern. Nielsen reported the sighting back to the mainland over the secure channel and was told that this was probably the Chazhma, a 459-foot-long Soviet “missile range instrumentation ship.”
The Chazhma had been observed by the Pacific Command departing its home port, Petropavlovsk, on June 15, to support a Soviet Soyuz space launch and had just begun her return to Russia when, it seemed, she was diverted to check on the Explorer.
The arrival of a Soviet ship, even one without armaments, was ominous, and the helicopter in particular worried Jack Poirier, who asked his men to move more canvas-covered crates to the helipad, in case the ship decided to send over a recon mission. This was wise. At 3:42 P.M., twelve minutes after the fog lifted, the helicopter took off, turned, and flew directly toward the Explorer. As it approached and buzzed the deck the first time, the ship’s provenance was confirmed by a large red star on the chopper’s tail. The helicopter swung around and came back, then circled the Explorer for at least ten minutes, as a man sitting inside
the open passenger-side door snapped photographs with a binocular camera. From the deck of the Explorer, security officers dressed as crew fired back, taking numerous photos of the photographer.
At first, the crewmen who’d run to the deck to see the ship and helicopter were passive, even startled, but the more passes the chopper made, the more emboldened they grew. They shouted, jeered, flipped the bird, and even mooned the helicopter. Some of the roughnecks were especially angry and were loudly discussing how easy it would be to throw a steel wire over the chopper’s rotors to bring it down when a security officer ordered them to shut up.
Then, having apparently exhausted the film, the pilot turned back toward the Chazhma. The act wasn’t overtly provocative, but it was concerning to both Poirier and Nielsen, as well as Parangosky and everyone else back in Virginia. Nielsen told Poirier to stay vigilant and to have the officer in charge prepare to dump the classified documents if the Chazhma were to put skiffs in the water to attempt a boarding.
At four thirty P.M., less than an hour after the chopper flight, the Chazhma made its first attempt at contact, activating a blinking light that no one could decipher through the patchy fog. When that signal went unanswered, the Chazhma moved five hundred yards off the Explorer’s stern and signaled that it would attempt to communicate using flags, the universal basic code of seamen. The Explorer signaled back that it understood, and stayed put while the Chazhma moved again, this time crossing the bow and announcing, in Russian, over the radio, that it was going to launch the helicopter. Once again, the chopper lifted off and circled, as a man with a large camera photographed the ship from all angles a second time. This time, the helicopter flew around and above the Explorer for thirty minutes, and Nielsen ordered his men to stay quiet and to keep their pants on, since even a joke had the potential of escalating a tenuous situation.
After several hours of failed communications, the Chazhma managed to locate a channel that reached the Explorer and the two ships began an awkward interaction in Russian. The Soviet ship announced itself as the “UGMT” and said that it was ready to receive the HGE’s message.
“We have no message,” Nielsen told his radio operator to reply. “Understand you have a message for us.”
This was met with silence and then a message: “Stand by five minutes,” followed by, “We were on our way home and heard your fog horn. What are you doing here?”
Nielsen, Poirier, and the rest of the mission control team all had the same thought at once: There was no way the Chazhma had come here because it heard a fog horn. The ship had been well out of range. Rather, it seemed to have set a very specific course to intercept the Explorer, here.
Nielsen decided to play it out. “We are conducting ocean-mining tests,” he told the Soviets, who then asked what kind of vessel this was. “A deep-ocean mining vessel,” he said, and, when the Soviets asked what kind of equipment was aboard, replied that it was “experimental deep-ocean-mining equipment.”
“How long do you expect to be here?”
“We expect to finish testing in two to three weeks.”
On the deck, nerves settled. Nothing about the conversation seemed unusual. The Soviets appeared to be accepting the story. A short while later, they called over one last time. “I wish you the best,” the Chazhma said, and then, at nine P.M., turned and sailed toward the Russian coast.
• • •
As deputy chief of naval intelligence for underwater espionage at fleet headquarters in Petropavlovsk, Rear Admiral Anatoliy Shtyrov’s job was to track and study the behavior of US vessels, military or commercial, and he tended to view any unusual activity as suspicious. Shtyrov had first noticed the Glomar II in the area of 40 degrees latitude, 180 degrees longitude in 1970—an area the Soviets referred to as Location K—and had made note of this to his superiors, only to be told not to worry. But he would later claim that American ships in the area could be involved in something that was occasionally whispered about in naval intelligence circles—a secret salvage of the K-129, which the Soviets called PL-574.
When another large “special” ship appeared at Location K in 1974, Shtyrov surveyed the Soviet naval options in the region and noticed that the telemetry vessel Chazhma was en route to Kamchatka from the South Pacific, after assisting in a space launch. He convinced the Pacific Fleet chief of staff to wire orders to the Chazhma’s commanding officer, a close friend of the K-129’s former CO, Vladimir Kobzar: “Proceed to location and follow the US vessel Explorer to determine its activities.” Shtyrov sent a second encrypted message to Captain Krasnov saying that he suspected the Explorer could be a military or espionage mission posing as a commercial vessel, but after extensive close-up observation for ten days, Krasnov sent word back that he believed the Explorer to be what she claimed to be: a drillship. Shtyrov radioed the ship, using a secure link, and pumped the captain for information. “He confirmed that all signs were that the Americans were looking for oil. A week later he implored: stores on his vessel were giving out!” With only enough fuel remaining to get home, the captain then turned and headed back to the Motherland.
52
Action All Over
The locus of operations during the recovery phase would be the control center, a series of connected vans located in the aft deckhouse. Anyone who worked on the various systems relating to the capture vehicle, as well as the mission director and his chiefs, would need to live in the control center for the duration of the recovery.
Once Dale Nielsen gave the order to begin the recovery mission, Captain Gresham would no longer be in charge; the men in this van assumed full control of the ship. If a catastrophe were to occur during the operation, it was likely to be noticed in the control van first. At that point, there might not be time for the bridge to react.
There were six operators in total, assigned to every specific function—video, control console, acoustic systems, and the capture vehicle operations—and these were the same men who’d designed them and knew them best.
Accurate signals from the bottom were critical, and as the guy who designed the telemetry cables at Hiller Helicopter and helped wire the whole system up, Ray Feldman spent his every waking hour in the control room, too, crawling around on the floor behind the consoles patching wires. On a ship with redundant systems in nearly every area, Feldman somehow had no backup himself. He was the only person who could maintain the link, so even though he had no direct role in the recovery operation, he was aware of every highlight and hiccup.
The control room wasn’t the only key location on the ship during the recovery. Down in a small, claustrophobic box built into the ship’s port wing wall, right at the waterline, was the heavy-lift control console. The story passed around by some of the contractors was that Graham put the controls at the ship’s most vulnerable point because he didn’t trust the pipe string, and if anything was going to sink his ship, it would be the steel umbilical. Graham wanted the guys controlling that string to feel the pressure, literally, by putting them into a part of the ship where the steel plates were under so much stress that they literally hummed. In reality, he’d put it there because it was the closest place to the gimbaled platform, creating the shortest run for all the cables from the console to the platform. Regardless, it was a hairy spot and the four operators—who worked rotating, twelve-hour, two-man shifts—felt the ocean’s power, and the ship’s relative fragility, on a second-by-second basis.
And then there was the pipe handling. Of all the things that gave the ship’s engineers fits, none was more consistently frustrating. The process of moving one sixty-foot double section of pipe every 3.3 minutes from the storage hold to the rig floor one hundred feet over the deck was one of the most intricate and complicated on the ship, involving six different machines, all of which could—and at some point did—have problems.
53
Meanwhile, Back at LAX
While the ship was on station, the skeleton staff b
ack in LA held a roundtable meeting at the program office to discuss what to do with items recovered from the sub that would be kept and brought back to the mainland for further study. In meetings of this kind, anyone was welcome to contribute, and the security staff would, as part of the process, poke and prod any valid idea for potential flaws. The general sentiment was that the items would be crated and off-loaded in Hawaii, then flown back to an undisclosed location in a chartered DC-10.
Brent Savage didn’t like that idea. It was too easy to foil. If the Soviets had any suspicions at all about the Explorer, they could track the ship back to Hawaii, follow those loads, and then raise an alarm. The easiest way to do that, Savage said, would be to sprinkle some kind of radioactive particles around the crates or the plane and then call in a nuclear scare, which would start a huge commotion that would make secretly transferring the materials impossible. “Boy, would that raise hell,” he said.
The safer idea, Savage suggested, was to box up everything from the sub worth keeping on the ship and take it back to Long Beach that way.
This discussion got CIA electrical specialist Don White thinking. Like any opportunistic contractor, White was already planning what he might do next, when the program was closed, and one afternoon he called his old friend and associate Wayne Pendleton into his office to discuss an idea he had. As far as the program staff knew, there was still no plan for where to take the materials recovered from the sub that required further analysis. I have the perfect solution, White told Pendleton. We used to work there: Area 51.
It was remote, secret, and extremely dry, an important feature when you’re working on decaying materials that had spent a long time in water. Pendleton agreed that it was a good idea and went off to work on a pitch that White could deliver to Crooke. He was working on that when Steve Schoenbaum, another of the security guys, stopped by and asked what he was up to.