The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  A few months before the K-129 sank, a top-ranking admiral told Congress that the single most dangerous threat to the United States was the rise of the Soviet Union’s “huge underseas fleet of 250 attack submarines and 100 missile-firing submarines, the largest force of submarines ever created.” A comprehensive 1969 survey by the Naval War College warned that not only were the Soviet subs a formidable opposition—they were part of a force growing at an unprecedented rate. “It has been estimated that the Russians can build 20 to 30 nuclear submarines a year in covered shipyards protected from satellite reconnaissance,” the survey stated. The United States, in contrast, could build only “10 to 12 a year in shipyards open to public view.”

  • • •

  Harlfinger’s next stop was the White House, where he showed the photos to Lyndon Johnson. The president, he later said, was blown away by the photographs, but Johnson was also in the final months of his presidency and had little motivation to put something in motion that might not survive under his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon.

  The submarine, of course, was going nowhere. And the Soviets had long since given up searching for it, so the matter was tabled until Nixon was sworn in on January 20, 1969. Not long after America’s thirty-seventh president took office, according to an interview Harlfinger later gave to reporter Christopher Drew, he called Jim Bradley. “Get your ass over to the White House and take Velvet Fist with you,” Harlfinger said.

  It wasn’t Nixon himself who’d asked for them. It was Alexander Haig, deputy to the country’s new national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Haig wanted the photos, and he wanted to hold on to them, so that he could show Nixon personally. This request shocked Bradley and horrified Harlfinger. It was a gross violation of protocol to transfer documents that serious outside of Naval Intelligence custody, but it was also clear that Haig was really going to get them in front of the president, so they made an exception. Haig could keep the photos, for twenty-four hours.

  Kissinger, then just forty-five, was chosen to be the key foreign policy adviser on the president-elect’s transition team, and he worked quickly to consolidate power, taking over the responsibility of receiving the important President’s Daily Brief from the CIA, which he had presented every morning in a basement room at 450 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the home of Nixon’s presidential campaign.

  Haig passed the photos to Kissinger, who took them to Nixon. During his campaign, Nixon had argued that the US military had diminished under Johnson’s presidency. One of the examples Nixon cited most often to prove this was the capture of the USS Pueblo. Here, then, was a thrilling opportunity for revenge.

  • • •

  John Craven assumed that the job of looting K-129 would be his. All of the Navy’s deep-water innovation to that point had come out of his office, including the Halibut, and it seemed only natural that he’d be the one they asked to get the sub. Craven had already been thinking about how he’d go about such a thing, from the moment Halibut’s fish had found it, and the simplest concept in his mind—the only one that made sense to him—was to use robots. Craven was confident that he could outfit existing gear to deploy from the Halibut that could breach the hull and retrieve specific equipment from the inside.

  But that was also a huge step beyond anything he’d done so far. And the targets were very delicate. It seemed very unlikely to others at the Pentagon that any robot could be remotely operated seventeen thousand feet under the ocean with enough care and accuracy to get inside of a wrecked submarine and pick up a code book, or, for that matter, a nuclear warhead.

  The chief of naval operations agreed. Craven was pushed out.

  CIA director Richard Helms wanted very badly for the Agency to take over the project. Whereas the notion of trusting an intelligence outfit with complicated engineering might once have been an insane idea, the Agency had proven over the preceding decade an ability to succeed in aerospace, another complicated area where it previously had no experience.

  As soon as Nixon’s White House let on that a submarine theft might be in play, Helms began to build a case for having the CIA run the operation. And his lobbying worked. On April 1, 1969, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, the tall, barrel-chested electrical engineer who cofounded Hewlett-Packard, drafted a memo to Helms asking the CIA to prepare a study of how the Agency’s technical group might get the submarine, or at least its most sought-after components.

  Helms knew exactly whom to hand that job to—Carl Duckett, deputy director of the Agency’s burgeoning hub of innovation, recently renamed the Directorate of Science and Technology.

  6

  America’s Top Secret Hub of Innovation

  Espionage is as old as warfare, and America’s first president was among its first spymasters, but there was no national department for intelligence gathering empowered by the executive branch of the US government until July 26, 1947, when President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the National Security Council and the Department of Defense, as part of the National Security Act. The act took more than a year of debate and compromise on Capitol Hill but established the CIA as an independent organization outside the control of the military that could spy and conduct clandestine operations but which would have no law enforcement powers. “I believe that this act will permit us to make real progress toward building a balanced and effective national defense,” Truman said.

  A year later, John Parangosky joined America’s nascent spy agency at the age of twenty-nine. He was born on December 4, 1919, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the oldest of three children from an American mother and a father who’d immigrated from Lithuania. John stayed close to home for college, getting his bachelor’s in economics at Washington & Jefferson College and, because he loved to play violin, a minor in music. When World War II broke out, Parangosky joined the Army Air Forces as a first lieutenant and excelled in covert ops. After the war, he enrolled at Columbia Law School before leaving to join the brand-new CIA, which was then headquartered in a brick building with white columns on E Street that formerly housed its World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  Parangosky was shipped back overseas, to Trieste, Italy, which at that time was an active post for running agents inside the Communist Eastern Bloc of Europe, and when he returned to the United States a few years later, Parangosky moved into the Directorate of Plans—the branch of the Agency responsible for clandestine operations—as a specialist in program management.

  In 1956, he was assigned into Detachment B of a new top secret spy plane program and sent to Turkey to serve as the administrative officer at Adana Air Base, which later became known as Incirlik. This was a very different role for Parangosky. He was the senior CIA officer within the detachment, charged with managing security, logistics, general housekeeping, and personnel matters—in particular, Parangosky had to navigate the complicated and often tense relationship between the Air Force, which provided the pilots (or “drivers,” as the program called them), and the CIA, for whom they were actually working while in Turkey. The pilots had to blend in as civilians. They were asked to grow their hair out and wear street clothes, to look more like “tech reps” working on an experimental weather plane program that was openly discussed in order to provide cover. The job was Parangosky’s first exposure to compartmentalized black programs, as well as to an increasingly important but lesser-known core of employees within the Agency: scientists and engineers. Helping brilliant men execute increasingly audacious projects would become the focus of Parangosky’s career, as he developed into one of the most wide-ranging and effective intelligence officers in US history.

  • • •

  The CIA’s original science and technology group consisted of a small team of scientists and engineers plucked from various defense contractors, or from within the military branches, and housed in a cluster of Quonset huts on the National Mall originally built for personn
el that poured into the nation’s capital during World War II. The wooden structures were so rickety that the heavy safes necessary to protect classified documents occasionally broke through the floors, like a scene out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It wasn’t unusual to see PhDs chasing away the rats that lived behind the radiators.

  Inside, men—and only men; the few women hired were exclusively in secretarial jobs—crammed around makeshift desks, working with hand-cranked calculators and slide rules, wiring together prototypes for early guidance systems, and then, at lunch and after work, strolled directly out onto the mall, a short walk from the Tidal Basin, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Potomac River, which in those days was actually still clean enough to swim in.

  The original name of that group was the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), which oversaw a wide slate of projects that used technology as a method of gathering intelligence.

  President Eisenhower had spurred the creation of such a group after recognizing that lapses in postwar spy practices had caused the US intelligence apparatus to develop enormous blind spots. When the first Soviet nuclear test was carried out in 1949, for instance, the United States was shocked because its own experts had predicted that the Russians were at least three years away.

  In July 1954, Eisenhower approached MIT president Dr. James R. Killian, Jr., with a critical task. Killian had overseen the vast Radiation Lab (RadLab) during World War II and became president of MIT when he was just forty-five. RadLab had been the largest scientific operation in America, larger even than the Manhattan Project. At its peak, it employed more than 20 percent of the country’s physicists and was the birthplace of various radar systems (including those small enough to mount on planes as well as direct-fire systems) and the first long-range navigation system.

  Killian wasn’t a scientist himself. He was a science administrator, but he revered science and technology, had an easy grasp of complicated subjects, and was convinced that small groups of smart people could solve any problem on earth. He’d seen it again and again during World War II, and the Manhattan Project in particular solidified his philosophy—that the United States, he later wrote, “was capable of almost any engineering accomplishment that it considered necessary to national survival. It possessed in its manpower and industrial base the power to achieve almost any single goal it set, provided only that it was willing to concentrate its energies and resources on that goal.”

  Eisenhower summoned Killian because he was worried. He and his closest advisers were increasingly aware that America was vulnerable to surprise attack from the Soviet Union. Several 1950 intelligence estimates had actually recommended that the United States prepare for a global war in 1954, which one report called the “year of maximum danger.”

  The president asked Killian to commence a study “of the country’s technological capabilities to meet some of its current problems”—and the highest priority of the study should be a rapid and accurate counting of Soviet nuclear capability, especially the number and dispersion of its new Bison long-range bombers, which a US military attaché spotted for the first time in 1953. The result was the Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP)—which gathered forty-two of the nation’s brightest scientists, with Killian in charge.

  The TCP created three separate projects—offensive capabilities, continental defense, and intelligence—and Killian hand-selected the members, putting Polaroid founder Edwin “Din” Land in charge of the intelligence project. Land was another of America’s great scientific minds, the forty-five-year-old inventor of the polarizing filter and instant camera who was at that time on leave from Polaroid and living in Hollywood, helping Alfred Hitchcock figure out a way to make three-dimensional movies. When Killian came calling, Land chose national security over entertainment and selected just five men to serve on his panel, employing one of his favorite management tenets—that any effective committee should fit inside a taxi.

  Beginning on September 13, 1954, the members met 307 different times and were given access to every major unit of the US defense and intelligence community. The panel’s assessment completely changed the way in which the United States went about intelligence gathering over the next two decades. Covert operations inside Russia were failing, the report stated. And the way to make up for that gap was to use science and technology.

  The rapid reinvention that Land wanted required an entirely new “laboratory facility where broad fundamental research in intelligence can be concluded.” This should serve as the beginning of an entirely new unit within the CIA—a group that would “pioneer in scientific techniques for collecting intelligence,” Land wrote to CIA director Allen Dulles—a group that would eventually become the Directorate of Science and Technology.

  • • •

  All along, Eisenhower fretted about leaks, and some of the TCP’s ideas were too sensitive even for distribution among the entire national security leadership. In October 1954, Killian and Land met privately with the president to discuss two ideas so highly classified that they didn’t want to put them in print. One was the development of a submarine that could fire ballistic missiles—this would soon be the Polaris class of subs that changed the nuclear battlefield and started a new undersea arms race with the Soviet Union. The other was a project proposed by Kelly Johnson, the maverick aeronautical engineer who ran Lockheed Corporation’s Skunk Works in Burbank: a high-altitude photo reconnaissance plane that could soar undetected, seventy thousand feet above the Soviet Union, in search of bombers, fighters, radar installations, and ground-to-air missile defenses.

  Johnson’s real name was Clarence, but he’d gone by Kelly since grade school, after some classmates took to calling him Clara. He joined Lockheed, one of America’s primary military aircraft contractors, in 1933 and was the company’s chief research engineer by 1938. In 1952, he was put in charge of Lockheed’s Burbank plant, and a few years later assumed control of research and development, turning that plant into a quasi-secret laboratory for advanced technology projects that was nicknamed the Skunk Works because of the overpowering stench that wafted over from a nearby plastic plant.

  Although the Air Force initially dismissed Johnson’s idea as “too optimistic,” he was certain that he could build the plane, and quickly. For approximately 22 million dollars, Johnson said, he would build twenty high-altitude spy planes and he’d “have the first one flying in eight months.”

  To Killian and Land, this was exactly what America needed to get an accurate handle on the Soviets’ war-fighting capability. If your concern is finding those Bison bombers, Land told Eisenhower, this is the way we do that. Eisenhower agreed. He told them on the spot that he wanted to build this plane—but rather than go through the slow bureaucracy of the Defense Department, he wanted the CIA to do it.

  CIA director Allen Dulles was also in the meeting and was worried that the Agency wasn’t set up to run such a project. It didn’t build missiles or airplanes. That’s just not our business, he said.

  You’re in that business now, Eisenhower replied.

  • • •

  On December 9, 1954, the CIA and Lockheed signed a contract and work officially began at the Skunk Works on the most secret project in the Agency’s short history. It was code-named Aquatone. Dulles handed the program to Dick Bissell, a Yale-trained economist who was working as his office coordinator. Unable to serve in World War II for medical reasons, Bissell helped run logistics for war purchasing, and afterward he imagined and then directed the Marshall Plan, helping to rebuild Europe from 1948 to 1951. Bissell was intimidatingly smart, a dapper man with a mind so sharp that one former colleague described him as “a human computer.” He could memorize anything, and he often did. His parents recalled him memorizing the timetables for the Connecticut railroad line between New York City and Boston in a single day, for no apparent reason.

  Bissell was surprised by the assignment. He found out a day after Eisenhower’s decision, when Dulles summoned him
to the director’s office and told him, he later recalled, “with absolutely no prior warning or knowledge that The President approved a project involving the development of an extremely high-altitude aircraft to be used for surveillance and intelligence collection over ‘denied areas’” in Europe and Russia. Bissell was to go directly to the Pentagon and work with Trevor Gardner and two of the Air Force’s top generals to figure out how the project would be organized and run.

  “Okay, Richard,” Dulles said, upon briefing him. “It’s yours.”

  Dulles told Bissell that Kelly Johnson would build the plane, and then he patched Johnson in over the phone. In the subsequent conversation, Dulles and Johnson agreed on a schedule, Bissell thought, “that was almost impossible to meet.”

  Granted, Bissell knew very little about airplanes, and he wasn’t an engineer, but he was an autodidact with a photographic memory. He arranged an overnight flight to Los Angeles to visit the Skunk Works and meet Johnson; instead of sleeping he read a book on aeronautical engineering en route, learning enough to become conversant in technical details, which made Johnson like and trust his new CIA supervisor from the outset.

  • • •

  The organization that emerged under Bissell’s direction was tiny and extremely secret. For Aquatone’s initial stage, only fourteen CIA officers were assigned to the project, including Bissell. Each was detailed from his home office position and remained on the home office payroll. As far as the record would show, they were all doing their regular jobs, and even their closest associates wouldn’t know their true assignment.