The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  This, too, had been expected, and to combat the decay, more than one hundred industrial air conditioners were moved into the moon pool and cranked to maximum power.

  The smell, one roughneck would later recall, “was terrible. Damp, rotten.” Others were less bothered. Hank Van Calcar, for instance. He’d been assigned to work on the missiles, had they been recovered, because he’d helped design control systems for US ICBMs, but he was useful here, too. He’d grown up on a dairy farm, “in blood and guts from the day I was born,” he said, and the smell, while pungent, “wasn’t near as bad as a barn full of cow shit.”

  CIA handlers had specifically forbidden workers from taking any materials from the sub, but those orders were promptly forgotten, as cutters and grunts stripped the bodies and the wreckage of souvenirs—tucking rings, coins, and bracelets into the pockets of their suits. Buttons were a favorite souvenir, as they were easily popped off jackets and hidden away.

  At the end of a shift, the men stripped down and the suits were thrown away in special trash receptacles. They were told to take hot showers, and if anyone tested positive on the dosimeter after his shower, he was sent back for another hot shower and told to scrub himself repeatedly until it felt like he’d lost a few layers of skin.

  • • •

  As the days went on, any man who wasn’t worried about exposure was welcome to join in the exploitation, and many did. All twelve Lockheed men volunteered, including Ray Feldman, who served as the unofficial photographer, using a CIA-issued thirty-five-millimeter to document every piece pulled out of the wreck. John Parsons put on a bunny suit, too, and went in early, searching through the sub’s former storage and bringing out cans of Soviet rations, including beans and cabbage, which he passed over to analysts for study. He also found a leg and, after moving some metal, the body attached to it, and as instructed he backed out and let the divers, who’d been assigned to handle human remains, come in and carefully move what was left of a Soviet submariner into the morgue.

  Parsons was told to pull out anything that might be useful—he found pipes, valves, handles, and tattered clothing and carried them out to the Agency’s consultants, who logged the items and put most aside for further study. The major targets of the mission might have been lost, but every piece could reveal some detail of value—what factories made the valves, the precise thickness of the inner hull, and the quality of the welds. The men were told to be fastidious and to overlook nothing, and after a complete shift it wasn’t unusual for any one of them to look up and realize he’d spent the whole time on an area not much larger than a phone booth.

  What struck Parsons most was how much it still looked like a submarine, despite an explosion, fire, and six years on the ocean floor. From the nose to the point at which the sub broke, where the metal had been violently torn, it was still very recognizable.

  The room was cool but humid, and masks fogged up. It was also awkward to walk and work inside the suit, and even men who didn’t get claustrophobia found themselves dying to get out of the masks and back into fresh air afterward.

  It didn’t take long for the Navy and CIA submarine experts to begin to glean valuable information. The Soviet submarine program was thought at that time to be more advanced than the US program, but what they saw of the K-129 was shocking. The steel hull plates were inconsistent, with varying thicknesses and irregular welds. They found two-by-four boards reinforcing some sections of the hull and hundreds of lead weights that they determined had been brought on board to adjust the submarine’s trim manually as needed.

  • • •

  Some of the men who’d volunteered for duty completed a single shift and then decided that the work wasn’t for them. This resulted in a new call for volunteers, and one of the CIA electrical engineers up in the control van decided to give it a shot. Prior to the mission’s departure from port, he had volunteered to be the photographer of the warhead disassembly, if they were able to retrieve the Soviet SS-N-5s. That was to be done at sea, and while it was a job that terrified plenty of crewmen, the way this engineer looked at it, if the warhead were to detonate during disassembly, it didn’t matter where you were on the boat. Everyone would die instantly, so he might as well see something interesting in the moments before being vaporized.

  Fumbling around the sub, in comparison, sounded like much less stressful work. He went to the dress-out van, got a quick instructional in procedures, and then was led onto the floor. He was tentative at first, fumbling in the heavy gloves and sweating profusely in the stifling humidity of the suit, but got used to it and began to feel more confident on the floor.

  He stepped through an opening in the hull and was surprised at how much space there was to maneuver even inside a submarine that had been crushed by the deep ocean. He was the first into an officer’s berthing compartment, where he got on his knees and swept under a bunk with his arm until he felt some resistance—an object. With a little push, it came loose and he pulled it out, recoiling in shock at the sight of an entire human head, still largely intact. It had flesh and hair and a nose, but no eyes or ears, both of which had likely been eaten away by the large blind crabs that were crawling throughout the wreck.

  On a later shift, the man stumbled upon the exploitation crew’s most important discovery yet—a two-inch-thick journal, remarkably intact, in a berth where its owner, a young officer, had apparently been curled up asleep at the time of the accident. His body was still in the bunk, in good enough condition that he could be positively identified, and the book, filled with handwritten eight-by-ten-inch pages, was, remarkably, in extraordinary shape. The engineer handed it over to the CIA’s paper-preservation crew and later discovered that it contained detailed notes written by the officer, who was apparently studying the never-before-known nuclear weapons capabilities of his refitted Golf-class attack submarine. The find, according to word that spread quietly around the ship, was important enough that it would be flown directly back to Washington upon the ship’s return to Hawaii.

  58

  Down Goes Nixon

  AUGUST 1974

  Two major events occurred on the morning of August 9. The first was that the Hughes Glomar Explorer completed the recovery phase of Project Azorian. The second was that President Richard Nixon resigned and left the White House in shame, swearing even to his closest aides that he was not a crook.

  Once the emergency work was completed on shoring up the sub and its armaments, Nielsen decided that it was best for the Explorer to leave the target site and resume the exploitation in safer waters, where the surprise arrival of a Soviet missile-tracking vessel would be a lot less likely. He told his communications officer to radio word via station KPH that the Explorer wished to head out. The message was overt, so anyone listening would have heard that Howard Hughes’s mining ship was notifying “Summa headquarters” that it had finished “Event 36-A,” a code that anyone in the program would recognize as the operation’s recovery phase. In addition, the message stated, analysis of damage to the “nodule collector vehicle” would continue.

  Back in Washington, Carl Duckett and John Parangosky discussed what to do next. The fact that the Soviet ships had left without causing any trouble was a relief, but other ships were within a day’s sail, and there was no way to know if the Soviet Navy might get curious again. On the other hand, there was still valuable equipment in the water; in particular, the ship’s wave-rider buoys, each worth twenty-five thousand dollars, had yet to be recovered, and to rush away without picking them up seemed riskier than actually sticking around to do what a commercial ship would do. So Parangosky ordered that the ship recover the buoys before leaving the site.

  Nielsen continued to radio back, via open channels, the ship’s progress. On August 10, he reported that engineers were still assessing damage to the collector to determine if it could be repaired at sea and that the ship would head, for now, toward a prearranged location near Midway Island where it
could sit for repairs if necessary. The next day, however, he had bad news: Repairs to the collector would take at least thirty days.

  This made Parangosky’s decision easier. He had the B crew on standby, ready to meet the ship and begin the exploitation with just a few days’ notice, so he told Nielsen to change course and return to American waters. The Explorer should set a course for “Site 130-1,” code for Lahaina Roads, off the coast of Maui. There, Nielsen knew, the B crew—specially trained to recover, process, and package the sub’s intelligence—would take over a more thorough process of exploitation. For cover purposes, this crew was described as an engineering team and would be led aboard by Summa’s Paul Reeve, who was already en route to Lahaina.

  • • •

  One day after Gerald Ford was sworn in, telling America that “our long national nightmare is over,” the new president met with his National Security Council in the White House Cabinet Room to get up to date on the most pressing crises on his agenda. One of those was the Glomar Explorer, which everyone in the room knew to be in possession of at least some portion of a stolen Soviet submarine and which, for much of the recovery process, was openly harassed by two different Soviet naval ships.

  “Bill,” the president said, addressing his CIA director. “What is the latest on our ship project in the Pacific?”

  “Well, sir, as you know, the tines were damaged when we picked up the sub,” Colby said, resulting in the loss of a significant portion of the K-129. “However, we have the rest of it inside the recovery ship and the ship has now steamed away from the area.”

  Colby also had good news. The Soviet tug that had caused so much worry had left the area and the Explorer’s security team was confident that the ship had no idea what the Glomar’s true purpose had been. It had been in the area on a standard precautionary mission, to be available to provide service for the new Yankee-class subs making their first crossings of the Pacific, and had merely hung around to bother the Explorer as a small act of Cold War posturing.

  This eliminated, at least temporarily, Ford’s most immediate worry. When he’d told his national security team to continue the mission during his first hours in office, he’d done so knowing that there was a Soviet ship in the area and that if that ship were to interfere, or even board the Glomar Explorer, the crew would be helpless. To maintain the ship’s scientific cover meant that no US Navy vessels could be anywhere near the site, so there was the potential—however small—for a repeat of the USS Pueblo fiasco. And that troubled the president.

  The director then moved on to the real question. What did the Glomar recover?

  “It is very hard to tell what they have, but they have detected some radioactivity,” Colby continued. “It will probably be as long as thirty days before they really know. We think that at least one of the missiles was loose and it may have fallen free, but it will be some time before we know just what the situation is. It is too bad that, with the whole mission having gone so very well, we lost the section that we did.”

  • • •

  A few days out of Lahaina, a cable arrived in the Glomar Explorer’s communications center and the staff sent immediately for the ship’s top officers and for John Parsons. John Graham, the message reported, had passed away at Hoag Hospital, back home.

  News of Graham’s death spread around the ship rapidly. Not every crew member on board had worked with Graham, or even met him, but they all knew that none of them would be there, at sea on a spy vessel with a stolen Soviet submarine in its belly, without him.

  Parsons was gutted. Even worse, the cable had arrived as code, over the secure channel, meaning that he couldn’t even send a message back to his wife acknowledging the news and expressing sympathy. This had been a mistake. Whoever sent the news did it over the secure channel unnecessarily, without considering the consequences, and it created a situation where Parsons couldn’t reply until the news was rebroadcasted over open channels—which finally happened two days later.

  • • •

  As the ship approached Lahaina, the cover continued to hold. A new round of stories appeared upon the Explorer’s return to Hawaiian waters, which coincided with the departure of a Japanese mining research vessel, the Hakurei Maru, from Yokohama. This, reporters thought, signaled an escalation in the race for underwater riches—“the billion-dollar treasure hunt for manganese,” the UPI called it—that was only just beginning. Down in Caracas, Venezuela, delegates at the Law of the Sea Conference were still debating the matter of ocean-mining rights, and an oceanography task force ordered by Hawaii governor John Burns had just taken samples from a three-thousand-foot undersea plateau between two Hawaiian Islands and declared that a mining ship could recover 1 million tons of nodules worth 785 million dollars in a single year.

  As promised, the Explorer was met in port by Paul Reeve, followed by a parade of mostly unfamiliar faces who came aboard behind him and proceeded to fan out over the ship, inspecting every corner. This was the so-called Tiger Team, a group of nonaffiliated engineers, mostly from Sun Wong’s Mechanics Research Inc., asked to figure out what went wrong, so that similar problems could be prevented if and when the ship went back out to complete the task.

  Like many of the key engineers on board, Dave Sharp had mixed emotions. He was disappointed at the partial failure. But the more time he had to consider it all, the prouder he was of what had been accomplished, too. The fact that they’d retrieved even a part of a submarine from 16,500 feet was one of if not the greatest marine-engineering feat ever completed. Which was only a partial salve for the pain of knowing how close they’d come to getting it all.

  One face Sharp was thrilled to see on the Explorer was that of Curtis Crooke, who’d been itching to get to the ship after spending almost two months in the program office feeling helpless and like he should have been out there at sea. The two men talked for a few minutes and then Crooke handed Sharp a package that was addressed to him under his code name, David Schoals. Inside was a plastic bag filled with bone fragments and ash and labeled, on a tag, “John R Graham.”

  When Graham was dying, he asked that his family have him cremated and his ashes sent to the Explorer, where he wanted them scattered. That way, at least in death he’d be able to spend some time on the ship that was the culmination of his career. Crooke had arranged to meet up with Nell before leaving for Hawaii and carried the architect’s ashes out in a box on his lap. “I’m not sure if that was actually legal,” he later said. “I’m sure I didn’t care.”

  Sharp wrote in his book that he was able to spend some time with Graham before the ship sailed for the mission. Graham was weak as they walked around the ship at Pier E, stopping often to catch his breath. Sharp says that he told Graham his ship was “an amazing engineering achievement” and that he should be proud. “Thank you,” Graham replied. “I am proud of it.”

  A few days after the return to Lahaina, just after seven P.M. on Monday, August 19, Sharp gathered on the Explorer’s fantail with Crooke, the ship’s new captain, Elmer Thompson, and a small group of program engineers. They each said some words, bowed their heads, and tossed John Graham’s ashes into the wind as the sun set over the Pacific, turning the sky a fiery red.

  Crooke stayed in Lahaina another week to debrief his engineers, then returned to the program office to begin planning for repairs. When the next edition of the company’s newsletter, Global Marine News, was printed, it included a touching memorial from the company’s president, A. J. Field, who credited Graham with helping to make Global into the industry leader it had become. “John’s finest achievement to me is the Hughes Glomar Explorer design and project management,” Field wrote. “He literally created a wonder of the world both in the object itself and the short time it took to accomplish it. . . . We are grateful for having known him.”

  59

  Crew Change

  Up and down the coast, members of the B crew were on standby, just wait
ing for a call. John Rutten was asleep next to his wife, Laura, when their bedside phone rang at five thirty A.M. on Monday, August 5. It was Dr. Don Flickinger, Rutten’s supervisor, calling from the program office. “The crew has the TO in the moon pool,” said Flickinger, a Stanford-educated World War II flight surgeon who had been in charge of “human factors” for America’s nascent space program, helping select the first seven astronauts in US history. “Someone you know will meet you at the United counter at LAX at 1310 on the 15th.”

  Rutten hung up the phone. “They got it!” he yelled. “I can’t believe it!”

  Rutten would be taking over from James Borden as the ship’s doctor. An internist who ran a large medical clinic in Santa Barbara, Rutten had been recruited some years back to work on secret deep-submergence diving projects for the Navy, including the famous underwater habitat, SeaLab. In that role, he met Flickinger, who came calling again when Parangosky asked him to join Azorian to find divers and doctors for the mission.

  Ten days after that call, Rutten met Flickinger and Mike Redmond, a physician who’d flown in from Hawaii to brief his replacements, as well as Jack Thiel, a new medical tech who would be joining Rutten on the B crew, at LAX. Flickinger took the men out for Wagyu steaks, then dropped them both at a safe house in Marina del Rey to get one more night’s sleep on land before departing for Hawaii to board the ship. The next morning, Flickinger delivered them to the program office, where a man in a dark suit introduced by Curtis Crooke as “JP” briefed the men who would comprise the Glomar Explorer’s B crew on what had just happened at sea and what they could expect when they joined the exploitation process in Hawaii.