The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Black contracts were always complicated. Many companies, small and large, had no interest in making their work with the CIA public. And the Agency was sensitive to this concern. To facilitate one skittish optical company recruited to work on the Blackbird, the CIA arranged for a major university to hire the company instead, and used a third-party attorney to write checks and pay for the work on that university’s behalf.

  This was a new kind of security support. Each contractor had its own individual needs and concerns, and the scope of these new, highly compartmentalized programs was unprecedented. Thousands of personnel had to be vetted and then taught how to work within the strict security protocols, which often required entirely new methods of communication and secrecy.

  To handle the growing portfolio of black work, a new security clearance desk code-named Project Rock was established within the Special Projects Office once the U-2 was up and flying. No one within the larger CIA knew which operations Project Rock handled, only that they were top secret and that its officers were all over America doing full background investigations on contractor employees. Project Rock security officers were looking for obvious things (criminal records, drug problems) and also potential weaknesses (affairs, unconventional sexual proclivities) that could make a person susceptible to threats, coercion, or blackmail.

  Having skeletons in the closet wasn’t an automatic disqualifier. Project Rock staff made it a point not to sit in judgment. What mattered was not that a man had done something that might embarrass him. What mattered was that he was willing to cop to this incident, because a guy who’s willingly owned up to his own demons has undermined his inquisitor’s leverage.

  It wasn’t unusual for security staff to clear more than a thousand people for a black program, but even within a program, how much information a particular person received was directly correlated to his or her need to know. There were three primary levels of clearance. Category 1 was for the administrative staff—people who handled paperwork, especially, and either knew the client was the CIA or were likely to find out at some point. Category 2 was for people who knew they were working on a project for the CIA but didn’t know what the end result of that work was. They might, for instance, be working on tooling for experimental airplane parts, but they didn’t know that the airplane was a high-altitude supersonic spy plane. Category 3 was for people whose job required full knowledge of the operation.

  It was hardly a science. Project Rock staff were authorized to make judgment calls, and the sensitivity of who should be given full disclosure was often a point of conflict between CIA security staff and their military counterparts. When Walt Lloyd was setting up security protocols for the U-2, he butted heads with the Air Force about clearing technicians who worked on certain key components, such as the camera systems. The military’s opinion was that these people didn’t need to know the geographic targets of their equipment. But Lloyd felt very strongly that handing a man that kind of information fixed him with responsibility. It elevated his connection to the work, making it more personal because he now carried the burden, too.

  That belief was vindicated one night in an English pub during early test flights when an extremely sober young tech introduced himself and said, “I just want to tell you that you almost gave me nightmares.” How did I do that? Lloyd replied. “You had them brief me on what we’re doing and I don’t want to go to town or to a bar and have a drink for fear I’ll reveal it.”

  To emphasize the importance of what these men were signing, Lloyd asked for a new kind of secrecy agreement. Traditionally, agreements were fairly simple and nondescript—legalese on white paper. Lloyd asked for “something that really snaps”—bonded paper “with a blue eagle someplace, or a symbol buried in the paper.” That way, he said, “When the guy signs this, he feels like he’s signing his goddamn death away.” It made sense. The CIA’s Document Department produced a new, extremely official-looking secrecy agreement that—despite having basically the same verbiage as the old one—carried far more visual weight.

  To isolate these programs, they were given code names so that anyone who saw a code name, or heard it, wouldn’t have any idea what it meant. A code name relates in no way to the actual nature of the program; that’s the point. Oxcart, in Walt Lloyd’s words, “is just a great big lumbering god-damn cart”—the complete opposite of a sleek, supersonic spy plane. Corona came about when Lloyd was sitting in an office with the satellite program’s contracting officer, George Kucera, puzzling over what to call the program. Kucera, looking at the typewriter on his desk, noticed the label: Smith Corona. “How about Corona?” he said.

  And the submarine job, known internally as “the boat project,” became Azorian. Code words are intentionally meaningless. The CIA maintains a register in a room at Langley that program security officers visit with proposed names. These names are checked against the existing registry to make sure they have never been used before. Provided a name is clear, it’s added to the registry, along with the security officer who filed it, but with no additional information. Somewhere, then, is a card with the code name Azorian and the name Paul Evans, but Azorian’s security lead is dead and no one connected to the program knows or can recall exactly why a word referring to the Azores island chain was chosen—other than it was available and meaningless in regard to stealing a submarine.

  If there’s any deeper significance, it’s a part of the story that’s been lost to time.

  10

  So, How Do We Steal a Submarine, Anyway?

  JULY 1969

  Among the reasonable arguments raised for not going after K-129 was that it might be illegal. A submarine is considered a man-of-war, and international maritime law states that salvaging another country’s military equipment is forbidden. But there seemed to be a loophole. A nation retains ownership of a sunken vessel only until it has been abandoned. And the CIA pointed out that the Soviets had mounted a massive search for the submarine after it vanished but then gave up that search and never resumed. In that sense, the K-129 was abandoned.

  There was also historical precedent. The Russians had stolen a sub themselves. In 1929, the Russian government raised the British submarine HMS L55, which had been sunk in 1919 by the Bolsheviks when European forces attempted to meddle in the Russian Civil War. The Russians returned the remains of the British sailors who’d been on board, then repaired the sub and reengineered it, using it as the basis for the Soviet L-class submarine.

  The legal argument, then, seemed moot. And the potential intelligence value of the haul was so significant, so potentially balance-of-power shifting, that those few in the know—extending to the highest levels of government—decided to green-light the project before the technical feasibility studies had even been completed.

  Carl Duckett, the dapper autodidact from rural North Carolina running the Directorate of Science and Technology, was ecstatic. This was exactly how he envisioned his division: as the government’s own Skunk Works for high-risk, high-reward operations. But when he took the news that the CIA was being considered for the sub snatch to DCI Richard Helms, the Agency’s director wasn’t nearly as excited. “He almost threw me out the window,” Duckett later said.

  One man who didn’t think the idea was crazy was John Parangosky. Though neither he nor the Agency had ever worked on underwater projects, Parangosky didn’t see why they couldn’t. When anyone asked him what aerospace engineers knew about underwater work, he liked to say that most of them weren’t aerospace guys, either—until they started making airplanes.

  • • •

  On July 1, 1969, the Project Azorian task force was formed and given office space in a secret satellite location in Tysons Corner, known only as the “think tank.” Officially, and in all internal records, Parangosky’s group was designated as Special Projects Staff, and anyone within the directorate knew better than to ask what that really meant.

  Duckett turned Parangosky loose to be
gin initial planning for the sub recovery, giving him the freedom to consider all possible concepts. Parangosky first recruited his chief scientist, Alex Holzer, along with Dave Sharp, an electronics engineer who’d worked on both U-2 and Oxcart.

  Sharp, who later wrote a memoir about his experience, recalled Parangosky phoning him at the University of Virginia, where he was in graduate school while on leave from the Agency.

  The two men had a long history of working together, and it had mostly been positive. Parangosky was a fair boss, occasionally even friendly, but no one was immune from his temper. Sharp discovered this firsthand in 1964 while the two were working on the Oxcart program.

  Sharp worked on radar cross sections of the A-12 at Area 51. The plane was ostensibly invisible, but it was brought to his attention that the Air Force had been tracking Blackbird flights on its air defense radar systems. Sharp did what seemed obvious: He told his boss. But Parangosky was under tremendous pressure to get the plane into service as soon as possible, and he completely lost it. He told Sharp that this was “impossible” and that he “didn’t want to hear it.” When the young engineer replied that it was the truth, whether or not he wanted it to be, Parangosky snapped and fired him on the spot. “Pack your bags and go home!” he barked.

  A day later, Norm Nelson intervened. Parangosky trusted Nelson, the man he’d picked to embed within Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works, as much as anyone. And Nelson talked the boss off his ledge. Sharp was allowed to keep working. Shortly thereafter, the CIA’s own study of the stealth capabilities of the “Ox,” as they called it, proved what Sharp had reported. The improved capabilities of Soviet long-range radar, as a memo to the Agency leadership stated, meant that the Russians—like the United States’ own Air Force—would be able to see the plane. “Therefore,” the memo stated, “it is impossible to fly the Ox over the Soviet Union without detection.”

  Sharp was happy to rejoin the program, and he didn’t carry a grudge. Dealing with sudden storms was part of working for one of the Agency’s most talented program managers.

  “Dave, I’ve found a new job for you that you’re going to love,” Parangosky said when he reached Sharp in Charlottesville six years later, and then noted that he was unable to share any specifics of that job at that time.

  “Do I have a choice, John?” Sharp replied.

  “No,” he said. “Be here next week!”

  At the beginning of July, Dave Sharp and the rest of the task force began a series of all-day meetings at the think tank to discuss concepts for plucking a Soviet sub from the bottom of the ocean.

  His first job was to help Holzer and Parangosky identify the directorate’s sharpest minds, or at least those that would be most useful for this particular challenge. They selected five men: Erwin Runge, an oceanographer who’d already been studying ways to collect intelligence from under the ocean as part of the S&T’s Office of Research and Development; Dr. Jack Stephenson, a chemical engineer better known by code name Redjack; a mechanical engineer from the aerospace world; a Soviet submarine expert; and Parangosky’s longtime associate Doug Cummings, who eventually became Azorian’s deputy program manager.

  Here was a group of men, only two of whom had any experience working in the oceans, tasked with solving perhaps the single largest engineering challenge in intelligence and maritime history: How to retrieve a 3-million-pound submarine from 16,700 feet under the Pacific Ocean—a feat that was exponentially more complicated than any deep-sea recovery ever attempted. And to do it in total secret, without arousing Soviet suspicion. Discovery of any attempted sub theft—before, during, or after the operation—would, in the most optimistic scenario imaginable, greatly damage improving relations at a time when the public badly wanted a thaw; in the worst case, it could start a nuclear war.

  Given two months to prepare a proposal of concepts for the recovery, Parangosky told his task force that it was their job to solve a problem that even the Agency’s director considered impossible. Because there was no time for his small security staff to clear new contractors, Parangosky recruited technical assistance from a little-known California aerospace engineering company called Mechanics Research Inc., a small shop staffed by engineers who already had top secret clearance from previous CIA projects, and from a naval architect in Seattle named Larry Glosten. His old friend Kelly Johnson also chipped in some eggheads.

  Then the debate began. No idea was too outrageous, and considering that most of the men in the room had absolutely no experience with naval architecture, oceanography, or undersea warfare, radical and sometimes ridiculous concepts were proposed. One early proposal typified the learning curve necessary for a group that had built its reputation on aerospace: What if deep-sea submersibles were used to attach rocket boosters to the wreck? The boosters could launch the sub up through the ocean and to the surface, at which point—well, that’s where that idea fell apart, since no one knew how to catch the rocket-boosted wreck once it hit the surface and before it began to climb into orbit.

  A suggestion that they could use enormous bags filled with gas to float the sub up to the surface was also rejected, though it was slightly less outrageous. It was theoretically possible to make gas on the seafloor—using electrolysis of seawater, for example—but the team’s lone submarine expert raised an important point. Submarines all carry compressed air in bottles for buoyancy, and without knowing how many of those were still on board the K-129, or how they’d react as the sub rose—they would expand and quite possibly explode or leak—it was very likely that the sub would become uncontrollably buoyant, rising through the sea at a tremendous rate and perhaps crashing into and sinking whatever was sitting on the surface above it.

  Both ideas had another major problem in common: How do you hide a wrecked Soviet submarine once you’ve blasted or floated it to the surface?

  The group pressed on. In mid-July, the deputy secretary of defense, David Packard, was briefed and came away impressed enough that he gave Parangosky approval to continue with the task force.

  One of the most challenging realities was that engineers were trying to envision a complex system to achieve something never before attempted—a system that would have to work the first time it ran. Because of the time and financial constraints, any kind of full-scale systems test just wasn’t possible. As the Agency’s own internal assessment stated, “Azorian would be a single-shot, go-for-broke effort.”

  More and more, the debate focused on two concepts: a so-called keyhole barge with a large hole in its bottom that would be lowered on cables and placed over the sub, essentially swallowing it, and some method of brute lift. Both would require an engineering solution that seemed to the men of the think tank every bit as daunting as the moon landing. Calculations showed that the amount of pentane gas required to float that much weight would be equal to two years’ worth of the entire planet’s supply. And the deep-sea lifting record in 1968 was held by an all-aluminum research vessel named the Alcoa Seaprobe, which had raised fifty tons from eighteen thousand feet. The submarine weighed fifteen hundred tons, a thirty-fold increase.

  “You can’t pick up the goddamn submarine or it will fall apart,” the Navy’s chief undersea spy Jim Bradley told Duckett when he delivered the CIA’s preferred concept. “That’s a pipe dream.” Others at the Navy were more receptive. In particular, Thomas H. Moorer, chief of naval operations, found the CIA’s plan to grab the entire submarine compelling and relayed his support up the chain of command to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who had his doubts but assigned the heavy-lift project to the CIA anyway. If nothing else, Laird thought, building a system like the Agency was proposing could help the United States retrieve its own distressed or abandoned subs in the future.

  11

  Epiphany

  The solution to this vexing, almost impossible-seeming engineering problem originated from an unlikely source: the National Science Foundation. In the spring of 1957, a review panel of scien
tific heavyweights for the NSF had gathered to consider sixty-five research projects proposed for government funding and rejected them all, disappointed that not a single one would result in a major advance in earth sciences.

  Unsatisfied, Princeton geologist Harry Hess and geophysicist Walter Munk from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography met in the aftermath to discuss what project would substantially advance current thought, given no restraints on cost or difficulty. The answer, they decided, was to obtain a sample of whatever lay below the Moho.

  The Moho, short for Mohorovicic discontinuity, is the name given to the boundary between the earth’s crust and its mantle, named for the Croatian seismologist who discovered it in 1909. The mantle makes up 85 percent of the volume of the earth, but no geologist in 1957 had any idea what it was actually made of. That’s because the Moho was, using any existing technology, completely out of reach—an average of twenty-two miles below the earth’s surface, and up to sixty miles deep in certain places, meaning that even in the best of circumstances it was far beyond the capabilities of any drilling equipment.

  The only way you might reach the Moho, scientists argued, was under the ocean, where the depth below the seabed was more like three to six miles. And at a 1958 meeting of geophysicists at the NSF, an engineer from Union Oil named A. J. Field showed a movie of a ship called the CUSS I—named for the four companies that owned it: Continental, Union, Shell, and Superior—drilling in two hundred feet of water off the California coast. Moving to the deep sea was a much more difficult proposition, but the CUSS I, a World War II barge converted into a drillship by a new company called Global Marine, proved at least that a full-size drill rig on a ship could work on the open ocean. The NSF was impressed enough to fund a feasibility study on drilling for the Moho in the ocean, and the engineer, adventurer, and bon vivant Willard Bascom gave it a name that stuck: the Mohole.