The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  All around the room, men sank into their chairs. The feeling in every one of them was of total disbelief. With more than a third of the pipe reeled back in, the control-center crew had felt that success was imminent. The touchdown, grab, and lift had all presented opportunities for error—no one would have been surprised to see a major malfunction there—but once the lift had begun, everyone relaxed. They had shut down most of the consoles and were just waiting.

  But now, suddenly, it felt like a failure. Some large portion of the submarine was gone, back to the ocean floor, where it would probably break into still smaller pieces.

  The failure wasn’t total, however. Something was still in the claw. And whatever remained in Clementine’s grasp could still hold secrets.

  Everything stopped while Nielsen and the command team met to consider how to proceed. Down in heavy lift, things were incredibly tense. Holding the pipe steady with the full load at the end strained the entire system, and Fred Newton was watching strain gauges nearly pop while hearing nothing from the control van except to hold his position and wait for orders. Periodically, he’d yell into his headset, asking for some direction, but for several hours, he heard nothing. It was not a good feeling.

  • • •

  Once reality set in, Nielsen directed the communications officer to send a secure message to Langley with the news that there had been a partial failure, and the lift would continue until whatever was left had been secured inside the ship.

  Back east, Parangosky digested the news and called Carl Duckett, asking the deputy director to come to the program office as soon as possible. Duckett had been following the Explorer’s progress intently from Langley, making regular trips to the director’s office to update Colby on how many feet the claw had risen since their last meeting. Like all of the operation heads, Duckett felt as if the hardest work had been done, and he took the news hardest of all. (Years later, Colby’s former assistant still vividly recalled “the disappointment and devastation.”) The program had come so far, having endured constant pressure from the Navy, and having solved a relentless barrage of technical challenges, and now—when every single insanely complicated piece of equipment had actually worked, and picked up this submarine—it was literally falling apart at the last possible minute, with success so close. It was too much for Duckett to accept and process, especially early in the morning.

  He fired back a reply that stunned mission control. He wanted Nielsen to send Clementine back to the bottom to pick up the lost portion. Nielsen couldn’t believe what he was reading. He handed the cable to Dave Sharp. “I guess you’d better answer this one,” he said.

  Sharp was the Agency’s head engineer in charge of the actual capture and raising. His opinion on this mattered more than that of a nuclear physicist and, according to his own retelling of events in his memoir, he prepared a carefully worded cable laying out the situation for Duckett: The claw had been severely damaged, with at least a few tines broken; there were no longer any breakout legs on Clementine to land on the floor and position the claw; and there was no way to know where and in what state the lost portion would be in. Basically, Sharp told the directorate’s most powerful man, there was no way to go back.

  Sharp’s response was sensible and correct. They could not try again. Clementine was broken. And yet, it wasn’t well received. Within minutes, a cable came that was signed by Carl Duckett himself. “Return to ocean bottom and recover remainder of target,” it said. “This is not a request. This is an order.”

  Sharp knew Duckett to be a smart, reasonable man. It was always possible to convince him, provided you made a logical case, and he was preparing to try again when another cable came in. “Proceed with plan to continue ascent,” it said. “Disregard previous order.”

  Common sense, in the form of Mr. P, had prevailed. Sharp would later learn just how furious Duckett had been. For a period of hours that day, he’d been insisting not only that the Explorer make another attempt, but that Parangosky give him an open line—an unsecured radio channel—to the ship, so that he could make this point clear, with his voice. Parangosky convinced his boss that this would be a terrible idea and then very patiently asked if Duckett would allow the lone Azorian engineer who’d been left behind in Washington to explain why another trip to the bottom wouldn’t work. Duckett was convinced. “But he hated it,” Dave Sharp wrote in his book. “We had come so close to recovering the entire target. He was devastated.”

  • • •

  As soon as Curtis Crooke walked in the door to the program office, around eight A.M. Pacific Standard Time, he knew something was wrong. The recovery attempt had continued through the night before, while he was asleep, and he half expected to arrive at the office to find a celebration under way. But the cases of champagne the admin staff had bought in preparation were unopened, stacked against the wall where they’d been put a few days before.

  The night shift had experienced the emotional roller coaster in real time. There was an overly large staff in the office that night, to monitor the final stages of recovery, and they all erupted when the first secure telex arrived, saying, “Congratulations, break out the champagne!” Hours later, that enthusiasm was dashed by a follow-up: “Disregard the previous communication.”

  The security staff briefed Crooke with the little detail they had. Communication to and from the shop was extremely limited under the best of times, but the crew on the Explorer also didn’t have much information to share at this point. The claw had suffered a partial failure during the lift, about nine thousand feet up from the ocean floor, and some of the target had been lost. No one knew yet how much, or what that was.

  • • •

  As the lift continued on the Explorer, and Clementine rose closer and closer to the ship’s bottom, Nielsen followed a predetermined order and sent an open message, via station KPH in San Francisco, informing the ship’s base that the nodule collector vehicle was more badly damaged than previously thought. This time, the reply came from Paul Reeve, Summa Ocean Mining Division general manager, and was addressed to “the Senior Summa representative” on the ship. This representative was to continue to assess damage and, as soon as he was certain of the specifics, begin twice-daily reports on the progress.

  What this exchange did was set a precedent, and a framework, for an open conversation of the recovery process, once the sub was on board and could be studied. Because each of these innocuous twice-daily reports would be embedded with code that contained details of the sub’s condition, as well as what if any important pieces of Soviet hardware had been recovered.

  Outside, the SB-10 was back at it and seemed more persistent than ever, as if its crew somehow sensed that the big drillship was wrapping up its mission. It made a pass within seventy-five yards, and then another within fifty yards, and failed to heed all signals from the Explorer warning the tug that the drillship was having difficulties and was unable to move.

  Worry spread through the security staff that the tug might be preparing something more bold. Jack Poirier, his security staff, and the onboard Navy analysts all conferred with Langley and came to the conclusion that, while the SB-10 probably did have divers on its crew, they weren’t likely to make an attempt to get under the Explorer. Those divers were there to assist in submarine contingency and limited salvage operations. They were probably certified to perform hull inspections, but only in controlled conditions and at depths of up to thirty feet. Going into the open ocean and swimming under an unfamiliar ship the size of the Explorer in the middle of a drilling operation was unpredictable and dangerous. They’d also be easily spotted, allowing the Explorer’s captain and crew to react with evasive actions.

  • • •

  By Tuesday, August 6, the mood on the ship had settled into a kind of calm. The shock of the failure passed, and the pipe-handling crew was now working with renewed vigor, removing doubles at a faster and faster rate. Clementine was within
one thousand feet of the ship and rising quickly.

  Inside the moon pool, crewmen were preparing for its arrival. The docking legs had been lowered to their maximum depth and workers who weren’t busy with a particular task were just watching the water, where they noticed some objects pop up out of the sea and bob around in the flooded pool. At first, it was unclear what these things were, and then someone identified the very clear outline of a fuel canister, followed by some clothing. These were objects from the sub itself, which had been shaken free by the more turbulent, wave-influenced depth where the wreck was now ascending, and they’d simply floated out of the sub and up into the well.

  This created a new worry for Poirier: What if other detritus was floating up outside the ship? The SB-10 crew had been grabbing anything, no matter how small or filthy, that came off the Explorer, and if they were to fish out a Soviet naval uniform or a submarine fuel can with Cyrillic letters on it, the situation could get nasty fast.

  Fortunately, that didn’t happen. In fact, with the stolen Soviet submarine just an hour or two from reaching the surface, the SB-10 surprised everyone again. At 9:35 P.M., as the last light of the summer sun was disappearing over the horizon, the tug moved within seventy-five yards of the Explorer’s starboard beam, close enough that Captain Gresham signaled the tug to stay clear. This time, the SB-10 listened. The tug moved around to the stern, as its entire crew crowded onto the deck, turned their backs to the Explorer, and dropped their pants, exposing a row of extremely pale Russian butts. The men on the Explorer’s deck howled with laughter, and a few of them, including Hank Van Calcar, returned the favor, which caused more clapping and laughing and waving. “Mooning the Russians,” he would later say, “was one of the highlights of my career.”

  The tug blasted its horn three times, turned toward Russia, and sailed away. Within an hour, it had vanished from radar and was cruising at full speed toward home, having spent thirteen days and sixteen hours observing a pretend mining ship that was really stealing a Soviet submarine.

  • • •

  In fact, the SB-10 had been sent purposefully to surveil the Explorer, but despite having what the fleet intelligence chief called “sharp-eyed lads” on board, the tug was also overly cramped and provisioned with only rudimentary spy gear—namely, binoculars and notebooks. After ten days, the ship was hot, smelly, and running out of food and freshwater. The crew had observed nothing suspicious and were suffering from poor morale.

  Back at fleet command, Admiral Shtyrov was unconvinced, but he was also out of options. When his fleet commander told him to give it up, Shtyrov made one last desperate plea. He wrote a report to the Navy Main Staff and then awaited a reply. Two days later, it came. “I direct your attention to more qualitative performance of scheduled tasks,” it said, and Shtyrov, he later wrote, got the message, through the bureaucratic doublespeak: “Don’t come around with your nonsense.”

  There were no more ships to send after that; the only thing fleet command could offer Shtyrov was the occasional reconnaissance overflight by a pair of Tu-95RC jets, but each of the three times those flights went out they were foiled by overcast conditions and could confirm only the presence of a large ship in that location.

  Desperate for any intelligence, Shtyrov even asked the chief of the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern shipping division if container ships working the Yokohama–Los Angeles route could navigate past Location K. They agreed, but with no time or budget to stop or linger, they could do no more than the planes—only confirm that a large ship was there.

  At 9:20 P.M. on August 6, the Explorer’s docking legs grabbed Clementine, relieving pressure at last from the pipe string and ensuring that whatever was in the capture vehicle’s grasp would actually make it into the moon pool. “Miner on legs,” Silent Jim McNary wrote in the heavy-lift log. Clementine was safe at last.

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  Assessing the Catch

  When the pipe string cracked the five-hundred-foot mark, men began to gather around the rim of the moon pool, watching the murky black water for any sign of Clementine. And once the tug was gone, the Explorer’s crew could bring the target into the moon pool and pump it dry without fear of being caught in the act by divers.

  Every man on board who didn’t have other immediate responsibilities wanted to be there to get the first sight of the target. And those who’d gathered cried out when an intact jerry can of torpedo fuel from the K-129 popped up from under the water and onto the surface of the well, as one of the men observed, having “traveled over 3 miles to the bottom and back and been subjected to pressures of over 7000 pounds per square inch without spilling a drop.”

  When Clementine approached the ship’s bottom, divers slipped into the water to assist in the final steps, and then returned with confirmation of the bad news everyone suspected anyway. At least half of the submarine had fallen away.

  At last, fifty-one days after the Hughes Glomar Explorer left Long Beach, the claw was lifted carefully through the gates, with just ten feet of clearance on each side, and into the pool, where the docking leg operators continued to lift until it was dangling over the surface of the water. Jim McNary was the lone engineer on the scene, amidst a crowd of roughnecks. He was stunned at how little of the sub remained—just a small, dirty metal tube wobbling around in the precarious grasp of the claw. It looked to him like that last section could slip free, too, and he called Sherm Wetmore to suggest they hurry up and close the sea gates to secure the whole package inside the ship.

  Once the gates were closed and the water pumped out, the scale of the failure was there for everyone to observe: Two-thirds of the submarine had been lost—everything from the conning tower back, which included both the missile tubes and the code room.

  The mood around the pool and in the control room was funereal. The intelligence officers were especially stunned by Clementine’s failure, since all of the major targets of the operation—the ballistic missiles and code machinery, in particular—appeared to be gone. Elsewhere, reactions were more mixed. To the roughnecks and pipe handlers, not to mention the Glomar engineers who’d worked on all the systems other than the capture vehicle, it was hard not to see what they’d accomplished as at least a partial success. They’d done their part. They’d delivered a very heavy pipe to a precise point on the seafloor and then pulled it back up with a huge weight at the end, fighting and solving problems along the way. As the oil industry saying goes, sometimes you drill a hole and there’s no oil there.

  • • •

  The mission director ordered everyone who wasn’t essential to leave the moon pool until further notice as he and his team viewed the scene from a balcony-like portion of the ladder that led down to the floor. Radiation monitors reported readings five times background even at that distance, indicating, as one officer noted, “that we were in for a nasty time.”

  First onto the floor were the radiation specialists from Livermore, who suited up and surveyed the wreck, sampling locations with Geiger counters and reporting back to mission command with good news: There was plutonium, but it wasn’t floating around in the air, so the inhalation risk was minimal. Plutonium is denser than lead, which means that particles would stay where they lay unless disturbed. Getting particles on the skin isn’t even a risk, since they wash off easily in water. The only time anyone would need to wear a breathing apparatus was when using cutting torches, because that would vaporize the plutonium and create a temporary airborne risk.

  The fact that the sub was hot was something the crew needed to know. The CIA’s sub specialist, Blackjack, called a meeting in the mess hall to share that news and to say that anyone uncomfortable with the idea of working on the exploitation of the wreck could opt out at any time. No one would be forced to participate. But the process would be onerous, meaning that they needed bodies, as many as he could recruit. Those who were willing to help were appreciated, he said, and should feel confident that the ship’s antiradiat
ion procedures were sufficient. Livermore officials had designed the protocol with exposure in mind.

  With the sub hanging up over the pool, in the grasp of Clementine and the docking legs, sand and water and organic material of unknown origin dripped from the wreck down to the floor. The first step, then, was to sift the gunk, and a team armed with shovels and saltwater hoses plodded into the pool, scooped up shovels full of material, and placed them in stainless-steel baskets with wire mesh on the bottom. They’d dump a pile in, then spray it to clear away the smallest particles, leaving only pieces too big to fall through the mesh, as if sifting for gold. Pieces of the sub were pulled out and handed to analysts, who’d carry them away for study, while human parts—jawbones, finger bones, bone fragments—were placed into bags and given to medics, who carried them off to the ship’s refrigerated morgue.

  Once the floor was cleared, it was the cutting crew’s turn. And they were already in a staging van on the lower level where special antiradiation suits had been set out. Among them was big Billy Collier, whom most guys on the crew called Bimbo. He had been hired for his expertise with a torch, to be one of the first men to go to work once the sub was inside the moon pool—cutting at the sub’s hard steel exterior to expose the parts inside that CIA analysts really wanted to see. Into the maw they went, careful not to bump into the sub’s many sharp edges, where the violence of the implosion had twisted and torn and sheared two-inch-thick metal plates as if they were plastic. The implosion also caused compaction, when the forces of the sea became so great that all the open spaces that weren’t filled with water compressed suddenly, like a toy placed into a garbage compactor. Nothing was easily accessed. Every inch had to be pulled apart.

  The work was immediate and intense, because the men were fighting time and temperature. Crews worked in teams of six on two-hour shifts. For six years, the steel hunk had been sitting in thirty-two-degree water, where it would in theory have been preserved in good shape for centuries. But as soon as the sub was inside the Explorer’s belly, out of the cold water and exposed to warmer air, decay set in. Within hours, the hull began to oxidize, and a rancid stench permeated the air around the wreck, getting worse every minute. That was the smell of decomposing human flesh.