The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

It seemed very likely, Craven thought, that the K-129 was lying on the floor in one piece.

  4

  Enter the Halibut

  JULY 1968

  On July 15, four months after the K-129 was lost, the Halibut slipped from her berth in Pearl Harbor and cruised out of Oahu, navigating past an armada of sailboats and fishing vessels anchored around the harbor. Up in the cockpit, atop the sail, Captain Edward Moore scanned the surface and ordered the engine room to increase power as the sub reached clear, calm water, with only ocean ahead for thousands of miles. Down in the engine room, the turbines began to whir, and Moore watched his boat’s white wake grow outward in a V shape behind the sub’s stern.

  “Let’s take her down,” Moore said as he stepped through a hatch into the sail and climbed down to assume his normal station in the main control room.

  Once the Halibut’s CO departed the sail, two lookouts lowered the American flag and followed the captain inside, leaving only the officer of the deck alone outside the hull. He inhaled a final gulp of fresh air, clamped the hatch shut, and climbed inside as the USS Halibut dropped under the surface of the Pacific, where she’d spend at least the next two months conducting one of the most ambitious and secret intelligence operations of the Cold War.

  The Halibut, her sail number painted over and hull now covered in a pattern of gray and dark gray camouflage, went to sea with a full house aboard—fifteen officers, 123 enlisted men, and six “technical specialists,” from government agencies that were not named—and the vast majority of the crew were not given specific details on where they were going, or for what. Among the Navy crew, only Moore and his executive officer knew of the sub’s true mission. To the submariners who served under them, it was known simply as the Special Project.

  Submarine duty is challenging for anyone, but the crew of the Halibut was asked for even more sacrifice, since her missions were secret and of open-ended duration. For months, those 144 men would be sharing a space with no windows, no TV, and no telephone. Personal space was virtually nonexistent, and no man on any submarine is ever completely comfortable with the knowledge that only a thick layer of steel separates him from an environment that will kill any human instantly. As if to remind himself of the fragility of the boat that protected so many men, Captain Moore had hung a wooden sign in his stateroom. It read: O GOD, THY SEA IS SO GREAT AND MY BOAT IS SO SMALL.

  Under the sea, there is no night or day, and men set schedules according to shifts, sleeping when they’re told. Showers, when possible, were extremely cold and extremely brief, because freshwater is a precious commodity that cannot be wasted on vanity. So long as everyone on board stinks more or less equally, any individual’s nose adapts, at least to the human odors. The waste matter is something else. Sub toilets can’t flush to the sea outside the hull, because the water pressure there is too extreme. Instead, toilets flush into a tank that is emptied periodically, when conditions allow. A man sits on a cold steel horseshoe over a bowl, finishes his business, then works a series of valves to open the pipe that leads to the tank, as well as the one that brings in seawater to do the flushing, and each time a man does this, hideous waste gases escape through the pipe opening from below. No one gets used to this smell.

  Days at sea can be tedious, and inevitably they blur together. A submariner on duty has little time to think, consumed with whatever critical operation he’s doing to keep the machine that keeps them all alive afloat. The Navy does what it can to bring comforts to the crew, stocking high-quality food that doesn’t spoil easily—subs famously have the best food in the Navy—and providing a library of entertainment. The Halibut went to sea with seventy-five reel-to-reel movies, many of them first-run Hollywood films.

  • • •

  After about a week, the Halibut crossed the International Date Line. The crew wasn’t given specific details about their location, but everyone deduced from the cold water outside the hull that they’d been heading north and west and that by this point they were almost certainly inside waters where Soviet subs lurked. That suspicion was validated when the order came down from Captain Moore to the engine room: Do not cavitate.

  When a submarine propeller spins rapidly in water, it creates low-pressure areas that form bubbles. These, in turn, collapse against the propeller and make a crackling noise that is easily heard by any nearby craft. When a captain orders his engine crew not to cavitate, it means that he either knows or suspects that an adversary is nearby. Additional orders instructed everyone to be wary of excessive noise. Until further notice, silence was to be the norm, which meant that while the crew could talk and work and conduct normal activities, they should all take special care not to do anything that resulted in loud noises that might be audible from the outside—such as slamming doors or dropping tools on the deck. Before any garbage was jettisoned, it was to be searched for anything that could implode in the sea, especially lightbulbs, which popped like little depth charges the moment they were ejected into the water. The Halibut’s crew was accustomed to dangerous work, and they knew the boat’s missions were secret because they were conducted in places other submarines couldn’t reach. The increased vigilance about silence only intensified the realization that somewhere out there—possibly quite close—were ships and subs actively hunting for incursions just like this.

  Once the technicians up in the Bat Cave were certain they’d reached the correct five-mile zone, they went to work. First, a search grid was laid out. Acoustic transponders were launched through the sub’s bow torpedo tubes at specific intervals. Once a transponder came to rest on the ocean floor, its location was noted using inertial guidance and added to a chart. Over the next thirty-six hours, the Halibut ejected and plotted the location of the entire array of transponders to establish a navigational grid that would be used to build a detailed map of the search area so that when the fish and its cameras passed over any particular point, it could signal the transponder and get its location within about five hundred yards—a remarkable accuracy considering the water was nearly three miles deep at that point.

  Technicians prepped and launched the fish through the hatch in the bottom of the Halibut, then began lowering it for thousands of feet. The process was slow and tedious. It took hours and was conducted with extreme care, considering the fish’s troubled history and the critical nature of the job it was about to undertake. The two-ton device hung from its wire tether a few tens of feet above the ocean floor—close enough to get a decent picture of what was down there but not so close that it might collide with underwater hills, thermal vents, or seabed lava flows.

  Then the hunt for K-129 began.

  For weeks, Captain Moore ordered the sub to sweep methodically over the target area, maintaining a constant depth to protect the fish, and varying the search patterns to ensure that no areas were missed, especially when the sub was changing course—all of this requiring meticulous cooperation between the bridge, the reactor crew, the ballast control operator, the helmsman, and the planesman. In the Bat Cave, analysts squinted and stared at the fuzzy side-scan sonar images, in search of large objects that warranted closer inspection with cameras.

  And as the days ticked away, frustration rose. Moore and the civilian technicians conferred and made adjustments, varying the search pattern and the depth at which the fish was deployed, hoping for a break. The crew did what they could to stay occupied, knowing that their sub—which was moving at a crawl with its precious surveillance tool trailing on eighteen thousand feet of cable—was about as vulnerable as a boat could be.

  Periodically, operators would reel the fish in so that the camera’s film could be retrieved, and the crew’s photo technician, Billie Joe Price, would then vanish into the adjacent darkroom to develop the photos. What Price was seeing wasn’t valuable intelligence, but it was the first and best look any human had ever had of this remote realm of deep sea. Hundreds and thousands of black-and-white eight-by-tens came out of the darkroom,
and because these weren’t sensitive documents, the photo tech was free to share them with the crew, who excitedly passed around shots of giant sea slugs, fish with huge eyes and bat wings, and all kinds of animals that looked like creations from a sci-fi film.

  At the mission’s one-month mark, morale began to sag. The operation seemed futile and doomed to fail. But all indications from above were that it would continue. It had to continue. Tempers simmered. Boredom settled in. Everyone on board had seen every film, and the best of the food had long since been eaten. Exhausted from seven weeks of searching, Captain Moore ordered the fish reeled in, and the Halibut limped home to Pearl Harbor.

  • • •

  By the time the Halibut got back to base for servicing, there was enough uranium—the reactor’s lifeblood—for only one more deployment, so after a short break, Moore gathered his crew and the spooks and set out again toward the search area.

  Everything about this final mission was more hurried and less well planned. The galley ran out of milk two days into the trip and the lettuce disappeared two days after that. By the time they reached the search area, there was nothing fresh to eat—only canned, frozen, and pickled foods remained.

  It hardly mattered. The Halibut’s final mission was all about purpose, about expedience. To return to Pearl Harbor this time without success would mean that months of work and stress and discomfort would have been a waste, and though the crew still had no idea what they were looking for, it was obvious that it was of incredible importance to the Navy, and the nation.

  Four and a half weeks into the second search, Price was given new film canisters and disappeared back into his darkroom just off the Bat Cave’s port side. As usual, the shy, soft-spoken crewman saw mostly similar frames of milky gray sea. At this point, even the freakish sea creatures weren’t interesting to him. He simply added those shots to the stacks on his light table, which had begun to resemble a small mountain chain. Even Price hadn’t been fully cleared for the mission. The young photo tech wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for. He’d been told only to keep an eye out for anything unusual and that he’d probably know what that meant when he saw it.

  Then he did see it: the conning tower of a submarine. Price’s pulse quickened. The fish’s strobe was bright and allowed for remarkably clear pictures, even at twenty thousand feet. And there was no doubt as to what he was seeing: the intact steel section of an unfamiliar sub, with four periscopes extended. He flipped through and saw more photos of sub parts, in clear contrast to the darker mud of the seafloor. There was a rudder. And there, the diving bell.

  When the photos were assembled into a montage, it was clear that the sub had broken in two main parts, and the larger section was lying on its side, with holes and tears. Some hull sections appeared to have fully buckled. What the tech was seeing was so strange, so shocking, so unreal after thousands of useless photos over dozens of endless days, that he froze there for a minute. He reached for the phone to dial the captain’s stateroom, and as he did, Price came upon the most shocking photo yet: A partial human skeleton, wearing a storm raglan, quilted pants, and boots, lying in the mud next to the wreck.

  “Captain Moore?” Price said, as his CO picked up the phone on the other end.

  “Yes, go ahead,” Moore replied.

  “Captain, it’s the photo hangar. We’ve found what we are looking for.”

  • • •

  It took three weeks for the Halibut to reach Pearl Harbor, and despite the fact that only the captain, his executive officer, the photo tech, and a handful of intelligence analysts inside the Bat Cave knew exactly what the boat had just accomplished, every man on board knew that they had finally completed their critical mission. The sense of triumph on the sub was palpable, and all those months of bad food, bad hygiene, crushing boredom, and near paralyzing frustration had been forgotten by the time the sub pulled into its berth.

  As the men greeted their families, several of them noted three naval officers wearing dress uniforms bedecked in medals climb from a black limousine, accompanied by two armed guards. They walked toward the Halibut and waited for Captain Moore and his XO, the last two men on board the sub, to disembark. The XO carried a black briefcase that was locked to his left wrist with handcuffs that the guards clicked open, so that he could hand the case over to the officers. Each of them shook his hand, turned around, and got back into the limo, which drove them off to the base airfield, where the briefcase began its trip back to Washington, DC, carrying a stack of photos that were about to change history.

  5

  Okay, Now What?

  SUMMER–FALL 1968

  Captain Jim Bradley was briefed about the photos long before they actually reached his secret office at the Pentagon, but he still wasn’t prepared for what he saw when they were actually fanned out on his desk: Here was a largely intact Soviet nuclear submarine captured in such clarity that the photos could have been taken in shallow water. The detail was incredible. Bradley could see that one of the sub’s ballistic missile tubes was empty and that there was substantial damage to the steel hull around it, but two of the R-21s were clearly still there, standing in their silos, and presenting an incredible opportunity for the United States to get its hands on something that seemed almost unfathomable: a Soviet ICBM with an intact nuclear warhead.

  Bradley took the photos straight to his new boss, Frederick “Fritz” Harlfinger II, who hadn’t even been in his job as the director of naval intelligence for a month.

  Prior to taking over Naval Intelligence, Harlfinger had been the Defense Intelligence Agency’s assistant director of collection, a job that required him to find ways to steal foreign military equipment for analysis. Under Harlfinger’s direction, the DIA obtained a Soviet MiG fighter in Syria, a Soviet surface-to-air missile from Vietnam, another Soviet missile from Indonesia, and the engine of a Soviet plane that crashed in Germany.

  These photos offered him a chance for the greatest theft yet—possibly the greatest theft in the history of military intelligence.

  The legality of this wasn’t an immediate concern, especially not in the wake of what had transpired off the North Korean coast earlier in the year. On the evening of January 22, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a spy ship flagged as an environmental research vessel, was collecting electronic intelligence just outside North Korea’s boundary waters, when a North Korean sub chaser and three torpedo boats appeared on its periphery. The Korean ships harassed the Pueblo, which was only lightly armed, and ultimately opened fire. Korean guns strafed the flying bridge with fifty-seven-millimeter explosive rounds, wounding the captain and two other crewmen. The captain ordered the crew to begin destroying sensitive materials and attempted to buy time by obeying an order from the North Korean ship to follow it toward port. While the Pueblo cruised slowly toward the hostile coast, intelligence officers worked furiously to smash machines with hammers, burn the most sensitive classified files in the onboard incinerator, and throw others overboard.

  When the Pueblo stopped just outside North Korean waters, the sub chaser opened fire again, this time fatally wounding an American sailor named Duane Hodges. Seeing no choice, the captain finally relented and surrendered his ship. The North Koreans boarded, bound, and blindfolded the crew, and then docked at Wonsan, where they paraded the captive crew past a crowd of cheering, jeering civilians.

  Months later, the United States was still stung by the loss of the Pueblo. The ship was held and plundered by the North Koreans, and anything of value had no doubt been shared with their Soviet proxies. It was later revealed that the raid was almost certainly ordered by the Soviets to obtain a Vinson KY-58 radio encryption unit, in order to decrypt and read the old cards that the American traitor John Anthony Walker had been handing over to the Soviets.

  Fury over the Pueblo incident only sweetened the opportunity to snatch the K-129 for anyone who worked intel at the Pentagon. Bradley selected the best of the photos in
to a collection that he code-named Velvet Fist.

  He and Harlfinger approached the rear admiral in charge of submarine warfare, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, either. This was something they had to try.

  • • •

  There was little argument over whether the submarine was worth targeting. Everyone invited into the conversation agreed that the opportunity was unprecedented.

  There were two primary motivations. The first was the tantalizing possibility of obtaining actual Soviet nuclear warheads. Everything understood about the enemy’s foremost weapon to date was gleaned from telemetry captured during missile tests. The telemetry provided analysts with information about overall performance of the missiles, but it didn’t tell them how the Soviets achieved that performance, or what was inside a live warhead. To actually possess, deconstruct, and reverse engineer a Soviet nuclear weapon could inform American warhead design, guidance, and missile defense systems. US analysts had no idea how accurate Soviet missiles really were. They also had no idea of the true power of submarine-launched warheads, nor how many of those warheads were on board a given attack sub. It was widely theorized that the Soviet subs (and land bases) carried two types of ballistic missiles—those with live warheads, and dummies. Why would a sub carry dummies? Because a nuclear warhead is expensive to produce and a dummy is nearly as effective a weapon considering that American radar and missile defense can’t tell the difference and aren’t about to start guessing as missiles approach the US mainland.

  For the Navy, though, there was another, arguably even more valuable prize—the cryptography. To recover a submarine’s communication systems for enciphering and deciphering code was the kind of thing that could upset the balance of power for years. Sure, the Soviets changed their codes and keying materials regularly, but the machines themselves could be studied to see how the codes were made and read. Capturing a Soviet cryptological machine would, in theory, enable naval intelligence analysts to decipher all of the classified chatter that NSA satellites were already intercepting. With the machines and the cards, analysts could go also back and read all the messages received in the recent past, to study movements and commands.