The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  “We believe the Glomar gobbled up a $30 million treasure, half of it belonging to the state of California, and half of it belonging to me,” he told reporters, noting that he’d already spent sixty-five thousand dollars over ten dives in a search to find the treasure. His next dive, he said, had been planned in precisely the spot where the Glomar anchored, and because the Summa Corporation and the US government refused comment of any kind, he was now uncertain of what to do. “Now we don’t know if we’re throwing good money after bad if they’ve already recovered it,” he said.

  Mysterious in life, the Explorer’s legend only grew after the program’s death—and the less the CIA said about it, the more people began to wonder if they’d actually been told the true story after all. For years after, a debate raged over whether the “leak” had actually been a leak. Maybe, some conspiracy theorists suggested, the mission wasn’t a failure. Maybe the Explorer got the whole sub and created the leaked story so that the Soviets would never know the truth. It’s not like they could swim down to 16,500 feet and check.

  Years later, former CIA director Colby mused on this in his autobiography. “There were those who were convinced that the project was completely successful and that then, in order to keep this a secret, I deliberately went around to all those newsmen to plant on them a false story that it wasn’t, fully aware that if I told enough people the story was bound to leak eventually. And there are others who are sure that I put the story out solely for public-relations reasons. According to this view, I reckoned that it would do the Agency’s image a world of good at a time when the headlines were scourging it for assassination attempts and illegal domestic activities to get the press to report on a project of such daring and brilliance as the Glomar certainly was. I must say that this is all nonsense. The Glomar project stopped because it was exposed.”

  • • •

  As predicted, the Soviets stayed quiet on the matter. At least publicly. In private, however, there was some blowback. The chief of staff of the Soviet Navy was called to appear in front of the Communist Party Central Committee at the Kremlin and given a stern dressing-down that he accepted stoically—and then passed on down the chain. He called the commander of the Pacific Fleet as soon as he was back in his office and screamed, “You really fucked up that one!” at a guy who wasn’t even in the position when the Explorer was out at the target site. Rear Admiral Anatoliy Shtyrov happened to be in the office when the call came, and as soon as he hung up, the commander turned and screamed at him, “You really fucked up!”

  Shtyrov, however, was prepared. He told his boss that Soviet naval intelligence had done everything it could do to stop the Americans from meddling with the wreck, but his warnings were repeatedly ignored by the high command. The leadership refused to help him, he said, and he had an entire file to back up what he was saying. The commander subsequently lashed out at Naval Command in Moscow, and both sides pointed fingers while doing almost nothing of consequence except firing Shtyrov, the one man who actually tried to do something.

  71

  All Good Things Come to an End

  Six months after Matador’s cancellation, in January 1976, Don Flickinger called John Rutten to tell him that the Hughes Glomar Explorer would be sent to Suisun Bay, the inland graveyard where the US Navy keeps its so-called reserve fleet of mothballed ships, in March. He said that Azorian’s program office had been permanently closed on January 8. Harvey, if it had even been left intact, would now and forever be just a staircase connecting two bureaucratically bland office blocks.

  Rutten asked if he could make one last visit to the Explorer, and on February 4 he drove to Long Beach, where some old friends on the crew updated him on the various sad developments. Clementine, they said, had been cut into pieces and sold to a salvage company for 144,000 dollars. It “felt like I was visiting someone’s tomb,” Rutten wrote later in his diary.

  No one intended to scrap the Explorer. The US government and Global Marine wanted to see the incredible vessel—loaded with state-of-the-art technology—find a new use. From March to June 1976, the General Services Administration published ads inviting companies to submit proposals to lease the ship; one bidder was the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, which submitted a 3-million-dollar two-year lease proposal contingent on the company’s ability to secure financing. Their plan was to use the ship to retrieve Soviet warheads. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get a bank to lend the money.

  More than anyone, Curtis Crooke wanted John Graham’s incredible ship to find a new purpose. He called on John Wayne, who’d fallen in love with the Explorer while motoring around it on his yacht, to write a letter to President Ford and plead for its survival. Jim McNary and Abe Person were asked to write a paper describing the ship’s remarkable gimbaled and heave-compensation platform systems. “It is now within the realm of possibility to do work in the deep ocean which was not even envisioned only a few years ago,” they wrote. “Hopefully, the technology developed on the Glomar Explorer will be used for the benefit of all mankind.”

  In the spring of 1976, Global Marine released a short film it commissioned about the Explorer and its remarkable features. It was twenty-three minutes long and featured the actor Richard Anderson, best known for his role as Oscar from The Six Million Dollar Man TV show, as the tour guide and narrator. “I’m now aboard what is probably the most technologically advanced seagoing vessel in the world today: the Glomar Explorer,” Anderson said while standing on the ship’s deck. “Exactly what this ship does, and what it has been designed for, has been an area of controversy and speculation. And yet, the potential uses of this ship can be instrumental in our survival. . . . The capabilities of the Glomar Explorer are giant steps in technology,” he continued. “There has never been a ship built like this one. The technology Global Marine offers us today can lead to resources never before available. Our future may depend on it.”

  Crooke had arranged for Global Marine to have right of first refusal on the Explorer for ten years after the mission, and he was actually willing to buy the ship outright, only to be told that the US government couldn’t sell it because an environmental inspection showed that it was highly polluted with PCBs from the hydraulic systems.

  The Explorer left a legacy, too. It introduced a host of new systems and also helped prove that a variety of technologies actually worked in deep water. It showed that a ship could handle tremendously heavy loads and that dynamic positioning really did work.

  • • •

  Those who knew a little or a lot about the Glomar Explorer and its covert activity were ordered to be silent. In March of 1976, Howard Hughes himself died, on a plane en route from Acapulco to Houston, taking with him the truth about how much he ever actually knew about the operation that will forever be part of his legacy. The Hughes businesses, of course, carried on, and Arelo Sederberg continued to help promote them.

  On December 12, Sederberg got one of the funniest letters of his career from the First United Methodist Church of Inglewood, California. “Dear Sir,” it began. “Our church group wants to establish a fact and we ask your help to determine if indeed the Glomar Explorer did entertain the crew with ‘Deep Throat,’ a pornographic X-Rated motion picture as reported in Time Magazine December 6, 1976. We are aware Time Magazine is not always accurate, if indeed they are able to read into any ‘story’ the sex deviate angle. Probably, they feel they are in competition with the numerous sex-pervert magazines which flood the market and degenerate the mind of the public. However, the Glomar was a federally funded operation and we want to know the TRUTH, the facts before initiating further complaints. We thank you for your cooperation.” The letter was signed by the “Methodist Men of the United Methodist Church” and noted that a copy had been cc’d to “President-elect Jimmy Carter.”

  A few days later, Sederberg mailed a reply, noting that he could not comment on “matters relative to the Glomar Explorer, nor do I wish to address myself to a
ccuracies or inaccuracies in Time. However, I will point out that in its December 20 issue, Time did question the validity of its source, a Mr. Rodriguez.” Sederberg was still enjoying the memory of this exchange in 2013, when he wrote a memoir of his years working for Hughes. “In effect it was a no comment,” he wrote. “We stonewalled even the elect of God.”

  • • •

  A little over a year after canceling Matador, in August 1976, President Ford was given a memo from his assistant for national security affairs, Brent Scowcroft, titled “Disposal of the GLOMAR EXPLORER.” The federal government had been trying since then to find a new home for the ship, he said, and had been turned down by the Department of Defense and “other Government agencies,” many of which “expressed an interest, but lacked an approved program and financial resources to acquire and operate the ship.” Congress, however, demanded that funding to the CIA to maintain the vessel be terminated by the end of fiscal year 1976.

  When no government agency could take the ship, it was offered for lease, but again, “there were no satisfactory bids.” (One, from a Nebraska college student, offered two dollars.) Two things seemed to stifle interest: the taint of its former life as a CIA vessel and what that might mean to operations abroad, and the tremendous cost of operating the vessel, estimated to be between 13 and 22 million dollars a year.

  Selling the ship at a tremendous loss was rejected by the GSA, as was selling it for scrap. In the end, Scowcroft reported, “the Administrator of GSA joined others in recommending that it be retained as a national asset. Mothballing the ship in the reserve fleet was cited as the most feasible and economical option for retention.” The CIA and Navy would share the 10-million-dollar cost. The CIA would also create a fund to pay for up to ten years of mothballing expenses.

  On October 4, 1976, Ford wrote back to John Wayne, to reassure the star that the ship’s fate was not sealed, despite rumors to the contrary. “Dear Duke,” he began. “I have your telegram on the Glomar ‘Explorer,’ and I would like to assure you that there are no plans afoot to scrap the vessel. As you know, we were, regretfully, unable to find an immediate use for the ‘Explorer.’” Ford went on to say that he remained hopeful that someone would want the ship and that until a new job was found for the Explorer, it would be placed “in reserve” at the Suisan Bay anchorage, east of San Francisco. To get the ship under the Bay Bridge, he explained, would require cutting off the derrick, “but that is the only use of the cutting torch planned.”

  In September 1976, the GSA turned the Explorer over to the US Navy for mothballing, and in 1977, it went to Suisun Bay. A December 6, 1976, LA Times story called the mission a success but had little new information to offer. George H. W. Bush was by then director of the CIA. Unlike Colby, the paper said, “he absolutely refused to discuss the event.”

  After a short period in mothballs at Suisun Bay, the ship was leased to Lockheed’s Ocean Systems Division, which started an experimental deep-ocean-mining operation—this time for real. Lockheed had built a prototype miner in 1977 that proved its ability to harvest manganese nodules from the seafloor, and in 1979, the company put the Explorer back into use with a one-tenth-scale, one-hundred-ton “mining machine” that was, finally, just that. The ship successfully mined nodules from a depth of sixteen thousand feet in tests off Hawaii using a remote-controlled “miner” that crawled along the seabed. Like Clementine, the mining machine had lights, sonar, and CCTV cameras used by operators working in the same control room where others had hovered the CV over K-129.

  Lockheed’s own Jim Wenzel led the spin-off ocean-mining company, backed in part by Amoco Minerals and Royal Dutch Shell. They named it Ocean Minerals Company, and Conrad “Connie” Welling, VP of the new venture, wrote a series of articles arguing for the necessity of ocean mining and explaining why the time was, after all the false starts, right to go mining under the sea. The experimental system cost 100 million dollars, according to Welling. A commercial-scale version, he estimated, would require an investment of about 1 billion dollars. It never materialized.

  In 1997, after a second stint in mothballs at Suisun Bay, the Glomar Explorer was leased back from the US government by GlobalSantaFe, as Global Marine had been renamed after a merger, on a thirty-year lease for 1 million dollars a year. Global refitted the ship to be a deep-ocean exploration vehicle and renamed her the GSF Explorer. The conversion was done at Cascade General shipyard in Portland, Oregon, and was the largest and most complicated job the yard had ever done. The architect in charge of overseeing the conversion said that, even nearly a quarter century later, the ship was like nothing he’d ever seen. In one room in the ship’s forward section, he found a blackboard “with a sketch of the grappling hook with the sub in it” still there, in chalk. A specialized electronics integration company was called in to inspect and overhaul the ship’s intricate systems, and the sophistication shocked the company’s engineers. “The Glomar Explorer was decades ahead of its time and the pioneer of all modern drillships,” the company’s CEO said. “It broke all the records for working at unimaginable depths and should be remembered as a technological phenomenon.”

  In 1998, the GSF Explorer drilled its first well, for Chevron, in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of seventy-eight hundred feet—a world record. In 2010, Transocean, the international conglomerate that swallowed GlobalSantaFe, bought the Explorer outright from the US government for 15 million dollars and made it the world’s largest offshore oil-drilling vessel.

  Other key components of Azorian lived on, too. The technology that made Hank Van Calcar’s CV simulator possible was used in the late seventies to build a simulator to train operators to emplace a 750-million-dollar oil platform in several hundred feet of water off Louisiana. “In this way,” a CIA engineering assessment reported, “the training procedures and hardware developed for Azorian have played a role in helping to develop the oil resources of the United States. . . . So the labor of love created by a group of Agency managers and engineers has borne a continuing reward.”

  After Matador’s end, the HMB-1 was towed to San Francisco’s Todd Shipyards and stayed there until 1982, when Lockheed bought the barge back and, in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), put it back into use as a concealed construction facility anchored at Redwood City, this time to build a top secret stealth ship code-named Sea Shadow. This was to be the seagoing version of Kelly Johnson’s Blackbird, and it was just as odd-looking, with twin hulls and a jet-black paint job. Sea Shadow was tested first off Catalina in 1985, after dark, and then hidden back away inside the barge during daylight.

  The Sea Shadow program continued, off and on, until 2006, when it was finally canceled and the prototype towed, inside the barge, to Suisun Bay and placed in the Navy reserve fleet.

  In 2012, the HMB-1 and Sea Shadow were purchased by Bay Ship & Yacht in Alameda and, when no museum could be found that was willing to pay for and store the stealth ship, it was disassembled at the Navy’s direction and handed over for scrap. The HMB-1, however, became an important part of the yard and is today still being used, every day, as a floating dry dock.

  As of this book’s publication, the HMB-1 is one of only two pieces of the incredible Azorian hardware still in use. The other is one of the two enormous floating moon-pool gates, which was sold to Diversified Marine in Portland, Oregon, to be used as the pontoon for a small floating dry dock in the shipyard.

  What about the ship itself? In September 2015, Transocean announced that, because of plummeting oil prices, it would be selling the GSF Explorer to an unknown buyer for scrap. After forty years of operation, John Graham’s masterpiece would be cut to pieces in a Malaysian port.

  The week the news came out I happened to be talking to Jon Matthews, the former head engineer at Sun Ship who considered the Explorer to be one of his proudest accomplishments. And hearing that it would soon be scrapped tore him up. He suggested that for this book I find a good pictur
e of the ship in its glory and run that next to a picture of a razor blade. “A before-and-after shot,” he said. “Because that’s what the steel will be when the ship’s cut up.”

  The trend in underwater innovation in recent times has been small, light, and fast, Matthews told me. The Explorer was basically a sledgehammer. “It was just massive and designed to kind of overwhelm the natural depth of the water and all the pressures that were there.” So much innovation and engineering at epic scale went into the ship, he said. “It’ll probably never be repeated.” And while the Space Station is a more sophisticated and complex feat of engineering, it was built with the use of computers, he said. The Explorer and its subsystems were designed on slide rules and John Graham’s napkins. “I don’t think we have the ability today to develop from scratch another ship like it,” Matthews told me. Also, unlike the Space Station, it was not built for multiple missions. “It had one job,” he said. “And it had to work or it would become an anchor.”

  AFTERWORD

  The Glomar Response

  When the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs launched its Twitter account on June 6, 2014, there was much internal debate over what the first tweet in the history of America’s notoriously tight-lipped intelligence agency should be. The decision, it is said, went all the way up to Director John Brennan. Ultimately, @CIA went with this: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.”