by Josh Dean
Six hours later, at ten o’clock on Easter night, Harvey Pitt, the SEC’s general counsel, wandered out into the dark lobby. “You win, Walt.”
When Lloyd related the good news to Warner, the CIA’s counsel told him that Colby was so thankful that he wanted to invite the SEC’s top commissioners to Langley to thank them personally. A few days later, Lloyd met the group’s car in the garage under CIA headquarters and walked them up to the director’s suite and into a conference room where Warner and Parangosky were already waiting. Both men expressed their appreciation that the SEC recognized the Agency’s responsibility in this sensitive matter and how important it was to the national security; then Colby entered and said that he, too, appreciated how the SEC had handled the matter.
At the meeting’s completion, Lloyd walked the men back out, and when they were inside the elevator with the doors shut, the SEC’s head of corporate finance, the man who’d started the whole affair, exhaled and patted Lloyd on the back.
“Walt, you don’t know how glad we were to see you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We were never real sure you were real.” Throughout the process, he said, several people at the SEC insisted that he was a con man representing Global Marine.
The story doesn’t quite end there. There’s a coda.
Three years later, Lloyd retired from the Agency and was doing some investigative work for the Gaming Control Board for the state of Nevada. When corporations apply for gaming licenses, they are investigated, and part of that involves going to the SEC to look through records for complaints and violations. Lloyd accompanied a team of agents to Washington to work on one particular case, and while they went off to chase down some files, he excused himself to visit some old friends on the fourth floor.
The Young Turk spotted him immediately. “Walt!” he said. “I need your help.”
He led Lloyd down the hall and into his office, where the safe still sat—occupying nearly a quarter of the space and blocking most of the view. “I want to get rid of that goddamn safe.”
Lloyd was dying inside, but he played it straight. “That’s government property,” he replied. “I am out of the government. I have no control over it anymore.”
Exasperated, the Young Turk explained the position that this safe had put him in. He had signed a pledge assuming responsibility for it, and he couldn’t move until the safe was out of his custody. But only the CIA could move it, and no one ever returned his calls about the matter.
“I wish I could help but I can’t,” Lloyd said, and headed back toward the elevator, leaving the Young Turk and his giant safe, which stored just a single document, in place. It may still be there.
67
Damn You, Jack Anderson
WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 1975
Bill Colby’s effort to convince America’s investigative reporters to sit on the sub story was one of his most impressive accomplishments as director of the CIA. But there was one stubborn reporter who just wouldn’t listen. His name was Jack Anderson.
Anderson, fifty-three, was at the height of his popularity as one of the nation’s most famous and feared voices, a tenacious reporter acclaimed for breaking news, often in defiance of his government’s wishes. His syndicated column appeared in more than nine hundred newspapers and his weekly radio show was among the most listened-to broadcasts in the country. A devout Mormon, Anderson saw muckraking—and speaking truth to power—as actual God’s work. He won a Pulitzer in 1972 for a series of columns that revealed a shift in US policy away from India toward Pakistan and feuded for decades with J. Edgar Hoover, who hated Anderson so much that he had him investigated and harassed and later described him as “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures”—this is fairly tame in comparison to revelations in 1972 that a few key Nixon aides openly plotted Anderson’s murder by poison in retaliation for his dogged reporting.
Anderson wasn’t always right, and he could be dogmatic and self-righteous, but the sum of his work was impressive. Upon his retirement, in 2004, the director of George Washington University’s journalism school, which collected Anderson’s work into an archive, described him as “part circus huckster, part guerrilla fighter, part righteous rogue.”
And at nine P.M. on Tuesday, March 18, 1975, Anderson sat in front of a microphone and broadcasted his story about the most audacious covert operation in CIA history over his Mutual Radio Network show. He then rebroadcasted it immediately afterward, at nine thirty, for those who might have missed the first show. Anderson told the millions of Americans who listened to his show every week that CIA director Bill Colby had attempted to talk him out of the broadcast but that he considered the rationale for that request illegitimate because the Glomar Explorer operation had become a white elephant. “Navy experts have told us that the sunken sub contains no real secrets, and that the project, therefore, is a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” he said.
Colby lobbied Anderson right up until the end; the two were on the phone five minutes before the columnist went on-air and, as Colby later described it, “blew the Glomar on national TV.” (It was actually radio.) Colby’s appeals had worked on the no-less-dogged Sy Hersh, but Anderson in 1975, a Pulitzer Prize winner who honestly believed the First Amendment to be divinely inspired, was basically unflappable.
Anderson balked at the notion that he was compromising national security. Parts of the story had been exposed, he argued, and the mission had already gone out to sea, made an attempt, and failed. “I don’t think the government has a right to cover up a boondoggle,” he said later, by way of explaining his decision. “This was simply a cover-up of a failure—$350 million literally went down into the ocean.”
Once Anderson broke the embargo, there was no longer reason to stop anyone else, and Colby understood that. He had made a promise to the other reporters who agreed to hold the story, so as soon as it was clear Anderson wasn’t going to heed his request, Colby pulled the list out of his wallet and called those journalists to break the news. He said he wouldn’t blame any of them for following Anderson’s lead. So, as Colby himself later described it, “on March 19, newspapers and television programs bannered these programs from coast to coast.”
Seymour Hersh had his story ready to go. On March 9, Hersh’s story, which had far more detail than Anderson’s, arrived under a five-column, three-line headline: C.I.A. SALVAGE SHIP BROUGHT UP PART OF SOVIET SUB LOST IN 1968, FAILED TO RAISE ATOM MISSILES. Hersh’s story was long, detailed, and mostly accurate, though it had several key mistakes, including a report that the Agency recovered the bodies of seventy Soviet sailors. It also revealed that Hersh had been aware of the operation, in some part, since 1973, when he got a tip and then agreed, at Colby’s request, to sit on the story in the interest of national security.
The Washington Post and LA Times versions of the Glomar story were also given huge chunks of real estate, revealing that in each case, while the editors had agreed to hold stories, they had not actually called off their reporters. This time, there would be no denying that this was the work of rogue, mistaken journalists. Project Azorian was now a national news story.
• • •
On the morning of March 19, as those stories splashed across America’s newspapers and TV screens, Colby attended a meeting called by the president at the White House to discuss what would happen now. He went knowing that Matador was finished. “There was not a chance that we could send the Glomar out again on an intelligence project without risking the lives of our crew and inciting a major international incident,” he later wrote. Colby brought along a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs to help inform the discussion he knew would follow—about how America should react, publicly, to the revelation of this outlandish operation to steal a sovereign nation’s submarine. Khrushchev’s book was relevant because the former Soviet premier wrote about the international incident over the shooting down of the U-2. In it, he e
xplained that he’d been aware of a US spy plane overflying his country for some time and had been planning to blast America’s “weather plane off course,” referring to the official cover story.
The plane’s existence wasn’t what upset him to the point that he canceled the Paris summit, raising tensions between the two nuclear powers to a dangerous level. What upset him was Eisenhower’s public mea culpa, when the president admitted on national television that he had approved the flights. This embarrassed the Soviets, and the way Khrushchev saw it, Eisenhower was the one responsible for his American pilot being held captive.
The lesson Colby learned from this was that while you might sometimes get caught spying on your adversary in unexpected and potentially very upsetting ways, it was worse to then add embarrassment by rubbing your opponent’s face in it publicly. Discovering that the United States had found a sub that its own Navy couldn’t locate would be humiliating to the Soviet armed forces, and to hear that the Americans then freely plundered it in open view of Russian ships would be an even more massive blow to confidence in the Soviet intelligence community. The only way to make that worse was to broadcast this fact. As long as the matter remained private, the Soviets could hide it from their own citizenry, and even most of the government, none of whom had access to American media.
So, as soon as Colby told the reporters it was okay to run their stories, he went silent on the topic. Literally from that day forward, the CIA director not only wouldn’t deny stories about Azorian; he wouldn’t even address them. And in that meeting at the White House, he recommended that Ford do the same.
The president concurred. As they discussed Azorian in the Cabinet Room, Ford listened to some of his closest advisers on the matter of the leaks.
“This episode has been a major American accomplishment,” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger said. “The operation is a marvel—technically, and with maintaining secrecy.”
“I agree,” Ford replied. “Now where do we go?”
Schlesinger recommended a simple admission of only “the barest facts.” Because Colby had already confirmed the story, privately, to numerous journalists, the options were limited. “There is no plausible denial story, so ‘no comment’ will be taken as a confirmation. If we move now we can take the high ground—if not we will be pilloried.”
The president’s counsel asked who would make such a statement and Schlesinger volunteered to do it—“unless the President wants to.” He felt that going public was almost required because of the Navy involvement, “so that it doesn’t look like they are part of a covert operation.”
Ford looked at Colby. “Bill, what do you think?”
One asset of the Agency’s director was that he never reacted to anything, making him notoriously hard to read. He responded quietly, patting the memoir that sat in front of him. “I go back to the U-2. I think we should not put the Soviet Union under such pressure to respond.”
• • •
Once the story was public, the Soviets reconsidered their opinion on the matter. On March 29, Ambassador Dobrynin passed a note to Kissinger that said: “Moscow was concerned about press reports of work underway off Hawaii to raise a Soviet submarine armed with missiles that had sunk in 1968.” In particular, he said, the Soviets were alarmed about the rumor that bodies had been recovered, and then returned to the sea. Dobrynin warned that the Soviet leadership “could not be indifferent” on the matter, if it was true, because this was a clear violation of maritime law—“a sunken warship remains the property of the nation whose flag it flew.” He demanded that Kissinger address the matter. “My information is without doubt no news to you,” Dobrynin wrote.
Kissinger had been waiting for a Soviet outcry, almost from the day the operation began. But faced with that resistance, he struggled to reply. “This whole problem has already caused extensive debate inside the government,” he told the ambassador, admitting that he couldn’t really say anything else until he had more information himself.
Soviet media later reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs openly accused the United States of violating international law, by clandestinely salvaging a submarine, but the US State Department replied that the Soviets had no such claim because they’d never announced the sub’s loss, thus making the wreck, according to the norms of international maritime law, free game.
Backed into a legal corner, the Soviets subsequently gave up that argument, but they did not cede the actual arena. Instead, they assigned a rotating cast of combat ships to maintain a constant patrol over the target area, to project a formidable message—that any future attempts by Americans to salvage the sub would risk conflict.
Publicly, the Soviets did nothing, and the official channels were—with those few exceptions—also quiet. It was only in private, in a few quiet conversations, that the subject ever came up.
On March 27, the CIA presented a summary of the Soviet reaction to Ford in his President’s Daily Brief. The matter was in the middle of the day’s foreign policy crisis agenda, below the imminent fall of Da Nang to the North Vietnamese, and the continued gains of Khmer forces in Cambodia. The Soviet media had still not mentioned the story, the report said, “even though it has been broadcast in Russian to the USSR on the Voice of America, and the BBC.”
The CIA’s read on the matter was that they had no clear read—“we can discern no pattern that would provide a clue as to the ultimate Soviet reaction.”
Most notably, aside from the back channel to Kissinger, the Soviets had made no effort to open a dialogue at official “working levels” in the State Department. The Soviet leadership was showing no unusual behavior and all scheduled meetings over strategic arms limitation remained on track. “The episode does not appear to have affected bilateral relations,” the report stated, in text that had been underlined for emphasis.
Two weeks later, the Soviets were still silent on the matter. The April 8 President’s Daily Brief was the second—and final—time the CIA summarized the situation for Ford. “It is becoming clearer that they want to avoid the subject if possible,” the report stated. It offered two incidents as evidence. A delegate at the 1975 Law of the Sea Conference told his US counterpart that the Soviets planned to say nothing and were pleased to know that the Americans had also chosen silence. And at a reception in Moscow, the Soviet premier greeted the US ambassador with “ostentatious cordiality” in earshot of many high-ranking US, Russian, and Eastern European officials, making a point to loudly declare that he was pleased to see the United States and USSR working toward détente despite the efforts of “those” who might try to divide the two nations.
• • •
Behind the scenes, Kissinger and the 40 Committee were already considering all of the potential outcomes. After his first message from Dobrynin, Kissinger prepared a memo for the president. “We could offer a quasi-confirmation and supply the names of the three bodies that were identified. This, however, would be extremely risky; any official, written confirmation by me would challenge the Soviets. Even if they did not react at present, they would have it in reserve and could spring it at any time. Moreover, there is no explanation that would assuage them. In particular, we cannot argue the legality or legitimacy of the operation without starting a polemic, and the Soviets cannot possibly concede its legality as their note indicates.”
Clearly, that wasn’t the answer. What Kissinger recommended instead was the same thing Colby had recommended—a continuation of Ford’s standing order to say nothing further. Like the director, the secretary was a student of history, and he, too, considered Eisenhower’s public reply to the U-2 failure to have been a huge mistake, escalating tensions when a more tactful approach could have allowed the Soviets to save some face.
In this case, Kissinger said, he was going to arrange a meeting with Dobrynin in which he would deliver a simple message. That message consisted of one paragraph, printed on special paper that could not be co
pied. It read: “The United States has issued no official comment on the matters related to the vessel Glomar Explorer. It is the policy of this government not to confirm, deny, or otherwise comment on alleged intelligence activities. This is a practice followed by all governments, including the USSR. Regardless of press speculation, there will be no official position on this matter.”
Espionage at its highest levels is a game, and like any game, it has rules that all players agree to follow. These rules are sometimes broken, but even sworn enemies who have entire arsenals prepared for the specific purpose of annihilating one another try their best to abide by them. The specifics of spying are secret and closely guarded, but the fact that spying is being done is very much in the open. Everyone does it. And no one talks about it.
68
Tumbling Down
Summa’s Paul Reeve was at a deep-ocean-mining conference when the earthquake of articles following Anderson’s news report hit America’s newspapers, and the shock waves reached him during a lunch break. Summa’s mining-project chief, who’d been playacting a fake job for four years, didn’t need anyone to tell him that this was the official end of the cover story, and knowing the storm he’d be facing if he returned to the conference, Reeve simply packed up and called it a day. There was no reason to continue the charade.
Naval architect Steve Kemp had left Pier E to join a new drilling ship, the Glomar Coral Sea, in Orange, Texas, after finishing work as John Graham’s on-site gopher, and then was recruited away by Chevron several months later. He never heard another word about the Explorer until he arrived back in California in March of 1975 after a month at sea on an oil tanker. The ship anchored at Chevron’s refinery in El Segundo and Kemp caught a launch into shore, which dropped him in Redondo Beach, where one of the first things he saw was a newspaper machine on the pier filled with extra editions of the LA Times. Across the top was a giant headline about the CIA’s secret operation to steal a Soviet sub. In a fraction of a second, all of the little questions and peculiar memories Kemp had filed away from his time on the “mining project” came forward again and made perfect sense.