by Josh Dean
Piccard the elder was a physicist who’d made his name assisting Albert Einstein, but he matured into a genius inventor with eccentric ideas who very much looked the part, with oft-bent wire-rimmed glasses and long gray hair that was infrequently attended to. He dabbled in all kinds of projects, including a high-altitude balloon, which he flew to a height of nine miles in 1931, breathing oxygen from a bottle—and doubling the record for highest manned ascent—but it was an obsession with the work of William Beebe, a bird curator turned ocean explorer at the New York Zoological Society, that turned Piccard’s attention to the sea.
Beebe was confounded by the limitations of underwater exploration, so in the 1930s he built the bathysphere, a perfectly round steel sphere with thick windows that could hold two men and be lowered a half mile into the ocean on a steel tether. Beebe made his first manned dive in June 1930, and he went on to explore the murky dark of the deep ocean from inside his metal ball for much of the subsequent decade, making numerous discoveries despite his inability to move the craft once he was on the seafloor, therefore limited to observing only what happened to swim through the cloudy yellow tunnel of his spotlight.
Piccard met Beebe at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and he couldn’t get the notion of these indestructible steel spheres out of his head. They became his new obsession. For years, he tinkered with similar submersible concepts, and by 1948, he was ready to test his own prototype.
Piccard’s bathyscaphe was improved in many ways, most notably in its lack of a tether. It also had thicker walls and more interior space than Beebe’s sphere and used a huge tank filled with gasoline to provide buoyancy (since gasoline is lighter than seawater). To descend, Beebe would flood an upper tank with water, creating negative buoyancy, and when he was finished down below, iron ballast was dumped overboard, which restored positive buoyancy and caused the sphere to bloop-bloop its way back to the surface.
The French Navy bought his first version of the contraption, and Piccard—with Jacques at his side—began work on its successor, the Trieste, named for the Italian city that helped fund the project as part of a public relations effort to become known as a hub of innovation. The Trieste was larger—twice as long—and safer than the bathyscaphe. In 1953, Auguste and Jacques hopped inside, closed the hatch, and plummeted nearly two miles into the Mediterranean, where they were disappointed to observe mostly just darkness and mud. Funding was difficult to come by, so a despondent Piccard was on the verge of abandoning his life’s work, when the US Navy appeared on his doorstep.
In 1957, the Office of Naval Research contracted with the Piccards for fifteen dives in the Mediterranean, so that summer Jacques essentially operated a deep-water taxi for Pentagon scientists who asked puzzling questions and scribbled illegible notes. Eight of those dives, it was later revealed, were for the study of sound propagation through the sea—studies that were critical to the development of the SOSUS hydrophone network. In the end, the Navy was so pleased with the vessel that it bought Trieste from Piccard, hauled it back to San Diego, and hired him to train additional pilots as well as serve as a consultant.
Two years later, an improved Trieste was ready, and on January 23, 1960, Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh traveled seven miles down toward the deepest known point in the Pacific, into a section of the Mariana Trench known as Challenger Deep. They spent only twenty minutes on the floor, staring agog at all manner of never-before-seen creatures, then began the long ascent back to the surface. The entire trip took nine hours and only one human (the film director James Cameron) has been that deep since.
• • •
To the Pentagon hierarchy, these experiments seemed like follies. All the momentum at the Navy’s highest levels was toward preparations for warfare. Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the so-called father of the nuclear Navy, was probably the most influential man in the branch and maybe in the entire military establishment at that time. In Rickover’s view, anything that didn’t improve the war-fighting capability of American submarines was a waste, and because subs didn’t ever descend beyond two thousand feet (and were rarely even that deep), exploring realms past twenty-five hundred feet under the surface was a waste of money.
On April 10, 1963, a single devastating accident changed everything. The USS Thresher, powered by a nuclear reactor and named for a type of long-tail shark, was the fastest and quietest attack sub ever built. It was to be the first of a new wave of twenty-four nuclear attack subs, which would ultimately be designated Thresher-class, armed with passive and active sonar and a new type of antisubmarine missile. Thresher’s main job would be to protect the growing fleet of subs that carried Polaris missiles, the new solid-fueled ballistic missiles that could be fired without surfacing.
Commissioned in August 1961, the Thresher underwent extensive tests up and down the Eastern Seaboard and impressed every submariner in the fleet. At eight A.M. on April 9, 1963, it left Portsmouth on a shakedown cruise in preparation for active duty. The submarine rescue ship Skylark accompanied Thresher during dive trials as a precaution and carried a McCann submarine rescue chamber, which could be lowered, with the assistance of divers, to evacuate and rescue personnel at depths up to 850 feet. It was the only sub rescue system in existence.
During one of these tests, just as the sub approached thirteen hundred feet, the commander of the Skylark, Lieutenant Commander Stanley Hecker, received a series of garbled messages from Thresher’s bridge. “Experiencing minor difficulty . . . Have positive angle . . . Attempting to blow . . . Will keep you informed.” And then communications were lost.
The most advanced submarine in the American fleet sank more than eight thousand feet to the bottom of the Atlantic, with 129 men aboard. A frantic search involving fifteen ships began immediately, but everyone in the fleet knew rescue was futile. Subs lost in the open ocean are not going to be saved. Two days later, on April 12, President John F. Kennedy ordered all flags to fly at half-staff for four days to honor the men lost in the worst submarine disaster in naval history.
• • •
John Piña Craven, the Navy’s chief scientist, was the only civilian at a meeting of the Navy’s top submarine officers at the Pentagon on April 10, when word reached the group about the Thresher’s loss. The admiral in charge of Submarine Forces Atlantic had been leading the meeting, a celebratory technology review, when he was called away and returned to the room with a sunken expression that every man immediately recognized. Craven was sitting next to Captain Harry Jackson, one of the Navy’s best naval architects and the engineering duty officer for the Thresher. Jackson had overseen all stages of Thresher’s development and was aboard every test until he declared the sub fit for duty.
The news devastated the room, and no one took it harder than Jackson, who just kept repeating the same phrase, over and over: “I should be there, I should be there.”
“What could you do, Captain?” asked Craven. “What could anyone do?”
The loss of the most sophisticated submarine in the Navy’s fleet created a cascading effect of short-term damage to the nuclear program. Fleet command was battered, the program’s engineers stunned, and volunteers to serve in the silent service plummeted. Worst of all, the Navy had no idea what caused Thresher’s loss, and without that knowledge it was impossible to prevent the problem from recurring, let alone assure the public and potential future submariners that it would be fixed. Among the many realities exposed by Thresher’s death was the futility of a submarine rescue system that reached a depth of only 850 feet; it was essentially useless once a boat had traveled even a short distance from shore.
A year later, a committee chaired by the Navy’s chief oceanographer recommended the creation of a new program that would provide the Navy with a way to reach the seafloor, perform rescues, and salvage lost materiel—and it would be run by the Special Projects Office, the Navy’s experimental R and D shop, which carried a deliberately generic name.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, who ran the office, felt that his team was already too busy with development of a new ballistic missile and next-generation submarines to take on another project that carried such importance, so he created yet another new group, the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP), and put John Craven, the Navy’s chief scientist, in charge.
A forty-year-old Brooklyn native, Craven had previously worked on nuclear submarine hull designs and helped lead the development of the Polaris ballistic missile system. Placing a civilian in charge of a major initiative ruffled feathers up and down the chain of command, but Craven’s appointment stood; to help assure the bureaucracy that order would not be upset, he was given the full legal status of a commanding officer.
Craven reveled in being an outsider and flaunted his iconoclastic nature, talking proudly of his direct lineage to both Moorish pirates (on his mother’s side) and the Union ship Tecumseh (through his father). Rejected by the Naval Academy, Craven had joined the reserves and then became a maritime engineer with big dreams, which ultimately got him into the Navy’s upper echelon anyway.
Craven’s team of engineers and deep-sea experts at the DSSP focused first on the creation of the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, also known as the DSRV. Everyone associated with the program understood the unspoken truth that saving a lost submarine that sank in deep water was an impossibility—once a sub reaches crush depth, no one on board could possibly survive, and on the West Coast, a sub leaving port was at that depth in twenty minutes; on the East Coast, it took about two hours. Craven knew that a strong, maneuverable DSRV would help expedite shallow rescue and also could provide the Navy with access to whole new areas of the ocean, for whatever reason.
Craven contracted with Lockheed Corporation’s Ocean Systems Division and with MIT’s Draper Laboratory, the only place in the country capable of designing the complex control and display system Craven had in mind. Draper, founded by the man who changed the face of naval warfare in World War II by inventing a more accurate gunsight, had built the computer and landing displays for the Apollo moon lander. The systems it created for the DSRV turned out to be even more complicated, because it’s actually much harder to control a hovering craft in a fluid medium than it is in the low gravity of outer space.
But Craven wasn’t just looking at sub rescue and recovery. In 1965, he was called to the Pentagon to meet with a mysterious intelligence officer who gave him strict orders to tell no one on his staff where he was going. There, he was told of Sand Dollar, a top secret program created by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to use whatever tools possible to retrieve Soviet war materiel—mostly the dummy warheads from test launches—from the seafloor. Sand Dollar was compartmentalized even from other cleared naval intelligence officers, meaning that information about the program could be stored only in very specific secured areas and could not be removed except in the company of an armed guard.
These so-called black programs had personnel and offices that couldn’t very well be hidden from other military and political figures, as well as funding that was accountable to the Congress that provided it. Thus, every black program needed a plausible explanation for its existence—an accompanying white cover. One tenet of all successful white programs is that many of the participants have no idea they’re participating in a cover. And the DIA saw in Craven’s DSSP a perfect home for programs like this.
It was widely known that the Pentagon demanded the creation of the DSRV to help save American lives and to investigate future disasters. But it also happened to be the perfect vehicle for doing underwater espionage.
• • •
This is how John Craven came to know Jim Bradley, the captain in the secret Pentagon office who recognized that the United States was in a better position to find submarine K-129 than the Soviets were. Sand Dollar was devised to find and recover warheads off the seafloor so that engineers could pick apart their guidance systems and construction.
The program was a new realm militarily and also legally. Hardware on both sides of the Cold War lost in international waters was essentially abandoned. It had no value to the original owner and was considered useless to adversaries because the floor of the ocean was such a distant and formidable place. If the Navy could hone its tools to get down there, and actually be operational, there was a wealth of knowledge to be stolen.
To really do this job, Craven decided, he needed nuclear submarines, which can travel long distances without surfacing. This is critical when the task is going deep inside Soviet waters, or when you don’t want to be observed searching for pieces of missing or abandoned equipment, often right under your enemy’s nose.
Among Bradley’s numerous responsibilities was oversight of the clandestine Office of Undersea Warfare, which conducted deep-ocean intelligence, and that gave him the authority to requisition certain very expensive machines—for instance, older nuclear subs that were no longer of much use to Rickover’s fleet.
One of those, the Halibut, suited his purposes exactly. The Halibut was an ungainly thing, a hulk of a sub with a bulging nose that looked as if it was inspired by the silhouette of a blue whale. That lump housed the Regulus cruise missile, and on March 25, 1960, it became the first nuclear sub to launch a cruise missile.
The Regulus was quickly obsolete, replaced by the Polaris, making the Halibut a slow and cumbersome mobile launch platform that had virtually no use to the nuclear Navy. But one of her primary elements—the twenty-foot-diameter hatch from which the Regulus was launched—caught Craven’s eye. To do the kind of intelligence gathering the DIA was looking for, he and Bradley would need a sub that could covertly deploy a new kind of submersible, and the Halibut and her gaping maw, with a few tweaks to the design, were uniquely suited to what Craven had in mind.
In February 1965, the Halibut was sent to Pearl Harbor to begin a 70-million-dollar renovation that was, as far as the world knew, to transform the sub into an oceanographic research vessel. In reality, the Halibut was kitted out with everything John Craven needed to deploy and operate a fleet of submersibles and other towed vehicles that could gather intelligence from the deep sea—cameras, electronics, sonar gear, sound recorders. After Pearl Harbor, the Halibut was tested, but Craven wasn’t quite satisfied. The boat was sent to Mare Island, an inland Navy base east of San Francisco, for a second round of improvements. There, her sail was raised to make space for National Security Agency (NSA) antennas that could intercept communications, and a system was installed that would allow the Halibut to hover in water, so that her crew of NSA and CIA analysts could study a specific site and even deploy saturation divers to take a closer look.
The biggest changes were in the Halibut’s telltale hump, a space that Craven renamed the “Bat Cave” and which became the sub’s hub of special operations. He remade the cavernous space into a three-level command center for special intelligence operations, with a darkroom, a data analysis center, and the largest computer ever installed on a submarine, the Univac 1124. The sub was given a two-ton aluminum “fish”—a twelve-foot-long robot outfitted with radar, sonar, cameras, and strobe lights that could be deployed from the hatch and towed under the sub on several miles of steel cable, providing Craven with a way to photograph the ocean depths.
Bradley’s first test for the group’s new toy was a mission to locate the nose cone of a Soviet ICBM in the South Pacific. Most of the crew wasn’t even told what the Halibut’s goal was, and when they began to deposit transponders on the seafloor through the torpedo tubes, the majority of the crewmen thought the sub was laying mines.
Then the problems began. The computer crashed, mechanical systems malfunctioned, and Craven’s precious fish—one of three in existence—was nearly lost when the threaded, seven-mile-long cable that tethered the 5-million-dollar gadget to the sub snapped on the spool and jammed the entire mechanism. After another follow-up mission during which the fish again malfunctioned, the Halibut headed back to Pearl Harbor, uns
uccessful in its search for the nose cone.
• • •
The Halibut was in port at Pearl Harbor when word of the K-129 plan reached Craven. He’d been privy to conversations about the missing sub from the beginning and had attended the secret meetings in which the SOSUS and AFTAC data was discussed, including a key gathering at the Naval Observatory in Washington on May 20, 1968.
Between the sinking of the USS Scorpion and the K-129’s disappearance, Craven’s deep-sea tools were suddenly in great demand. Each disaster showed up differently on the acoustic data. The Scorpion had very clearly suffered some kind of catastrophic accident while submerged. The K-129, on the other hand, appeared to have exploded while on the surface, and though the blip on the data was smaller for the Soviet sub than for the Scorpion, this difference seemed to be a compelling clue: The sound of a surface explosion wouldn’t be conveyed very well through the water, so the fact that a “good-sized bang,” in the words of SOSUS inventor Joseph Kelly, showed up on the hydrophone readings meant that whatever happened up top was a significant event. Craven saw something else in those results. There was no second large blip in the data, which some expected to see when the crippled sub passed through its crush depth. Most likely K-129 had sunk with its hatches open and the sub had been flooded with water that equalized the pressure and prevented an implosion. In theory, this meant the wreck would be more intact, and would have gone basically straight down from the coordinates where it was last identified. Craven wanted to test that idea.
He requisitioned a World War II–era sub and sank it with the hatches open out at sea, in a place where the hydrophones would be listening. There was no implosion.
