The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  Mr. P never relaxed, and in an operation this complicated, with so many people and points of entry, he was always looking for ways to minimize risk. He considered the frequent and predictable travel of his Agency engineers from the East Coast to the West Coast a potential weak spot. A trained foreign intelligence officer who had even slight suspicions about activity from either office might begin studying passenger manifests in search of names that repeated often and flew regular routes and times. These people could then be followed or even approached. Parangosky asked Paul Evans to create a way to cover their tracks.

  The solution became a project legend that Dave Sharp later revealed in his memoir about the operation. An Azorian security staffer asked one of the program’s contractors to negotiate a series of unusual agreements with a major car rental company and a national hotel chain with locations in all the major project cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia. Anyone who checked into that car company or hotel chain using the name “Bob James” would be given a car or room without being asked for identification or any further information. This worked well, so long as the men were traveling alone, but also resulted in some Abbott and Costello–style scenarios such as the time, according to Sharp, when five different program officers were traveling together and checked in for cars at a busy airport rental desk at the same time.

  The first Bob James got a car without question, and the second one got his with some raised eyebrows, but when the third man in a suit with the same name arrived at the counter, the bemused clerk looked out at the line and asked, “Are there any more Bob Jameses in the line?”

  Two men raised their hands.

  “How can you all be Bob James?” she asked.

  “We’re an acrobatic team,” one replied. “The Flying James Boys.”

  Crooke and his staff had to learn similar practices. Anytime Global’s boss went east, he flew under a fake name, and even mundane paperwork was done using a system of code.

  The largest CIA contingent in the program office was made up of security officers working under Paul Evans. Evans himself rarely came west—he, too, was sight sensitive—so he put a young officer named Steve Clark in charge of the program office security with a cover as office manager. Paul Ito, a security officer hired in from TRW, was installed as the program’s head of human resources, “hired” by Global Marine. And the rest of the security staff was made up of new hires. The most notable of these was Brent Savage, a retired California police detective who favored aviator sunglasses and garishly printed Hawaiian shirts. Savage took the work of maintaining program security extremely seriously, but he also relished his role as an antagonist, annoying workers who had little experience in project cover.

  In a few cases, CIA engineers were asked to embed directly in key positions within the office. Parangosky’s most important plant at the program office was Norm Nelson, a fifty-three-year-old former Air Force captain with white hair who wore tailored suits and large black-framed Wayfarer glasses. Nelson moved from the aviation industry into the CIA in 1961 and was the man Parangosky handpicked to babysit Kelly Johnson during Oxcart. Parangosky relied greatly on Nelson’s ability to converse with contractors and especially military personnel, who often resented the Agency’s role in defense projects. At the program office, Nelson was Parangosky’s spy—his eyes and ears—and the two had daily debriefs by phone.

  Nelson was less popular with the men who worked under him. He was, as one said, “about 200% politician,” excellent at ingratiating himself to Parangosky and also to the people who mattered—especially contractors who might one day employ him. Said one: “He was a sneaky, lying, son of a bitch. But he was smooth.”

  Contractors who’d worked with Parangosky on other programs recognized that he had a very unusual and effective management technique that one former electrical engineer called “management by uncomfortableness.” Parangosky was always focused on progress and on the schedule, and he understood that if you give technical people too much time to contemplate a problem, they’ll always take it. Those same people are capable of working much more quickly, and often you don’t need a perfect solution. You can always iterate. So what he did, according to a former employee, was keep a “cadre of four or five really dumb engineers in his office.” It’s unlikely that these engineers were actually dumb, but they may well have been less sharp than the ones who worked for the various contractors. On occasions when a problem arose and no immediate solution was suggested, Parangosky would dispatch two of these engineers to “help.” And the mere threat of this, according to a former program worker, was remarkably effective. “There was a huge incentive to get it fixed before they got there.”

  There were very few Navy men officially detailed to Azorian, but certain officers would appear regularly for consultations and meetings, and Brent Savage had a grand old time pointing out how badly they filled in. The CIA was formal, as any federal agency has to be, but it was nothing in comparison to the Navy, which considers order and respect sacrosanct. But in a CIA operation, even the Navy officers have to follow the Agency rules, and no rule was more important than maintaining cover. Savage gleefully scolded Navy officers for their poor civilian outfits and never missed a chance to speak his mind in meetings, either. For years afterward, engineers traded Savage stories, one favorite being the time a captain, working in the office as a civilian, pulled him aside to point out what he considered a lack of respect. “Perhaps you don’t know this, son, but I’m a naval officer,” the man said, and Savage nodded glumly. “I know that,” he replied. “I noticed the Navy ring when you were picking your nose.”

  The program office was the nerve center for the operation, keeping watch and control over the multiple distinct and extremely complicated engineering projects, each one moving at a frantic pace, and based elsewhere with subcontractors who were trusted but also closely watched. The primary function of the office during the design phase was to monitor each piece of the puzzle—the ship, the barge, the claw, the pipe, the electronics, and the many smaller contributions by contractors scattered around America—and to make sure they all worked and could be assembled together in the end into a working tool—a sub-snatching supership.

  Crooke placed Sherman Wetmore in a critical role, as the systems engineer in charge of integration. Wetmore was talented, affable, and a bit of a savant. John Graham could have used him on the ship design, but Crooke wanted him in the program office instead.

  Wetmore was a babe, relatively. He joined Global Marine in 1961, straight out of college, and bounced around various departments, learning more about maritime engineering in a few years than he could have in a decade of grad school. While in college, he’d worked as a draftsman for John Graham at his Houston naval architecture firm, and Graham hired him upon graduation.

  Wetmore first heard about a secret mining project when Crooke and Graham called him into some early meetings, where they were just figuring out how such a thing might be possible. It was an ocean engineer’s dream job—to contribute to the creation of a completely new industry—and he was thrilled to join the project. Once Wetmore was cleared and heard the true story, he was even more excited. He was by that time no longer green at all. The company was in a period of almost unbelievable productivity and innovation, and Wetmore had contributed significantly to Glomar II, III, IV, and V and Challenger, which was christened in 1968.

  This was new work for Wetmore. As a systems engineer, he would not be contributing to the design of any particular component of the ship. Instead, he met daily with the embedded reps from every major contractor and made frequent trips to San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Redwood City (as well as Rochester, New York; Houston; and Detroit) for progress checks at the various facilities where construction was under way. He was easy to work with, he was clever, and he possessed an ability to see solutions where others were missing them. The contractors trusted Wetmore, and so did the CIA.

  Ev
en as work began in earnest at locations across America, the feeling in Washington was that Azorian was a long shot at best. When the program was formally approved, the Agency’s internal analysis stated that the chance of success was only about 10 percent, but as the engineering work progressed, that number began to steadily tick upward.

  21

  Back to the Wreck Site

  In September of 1970, the engineering staffs in Los Angeles and Tysons Corner realized that they needed more data before finalizing design of the Lockheed machine that would grab the sub off the ocean floor, which was typically referred to as the “capture vehicle” or just the CV. The engineers wanted a new round of photographs of the wreck, looking in particular at the precise orientation of the sub on the seafloor, and needed more information about the site itself. Specifically, they wanted to know the slope of the land where the sub lay, as well as the composition of the seabed sediment there—how soft or sticky it was—which would impact how much force was required to pull the wreck out of the mud.

  The work could be done with almost any drillship capable of lowering equipment to the bottom of the ocean. Curtis Crooke offered up the Glomar II, a 268-foot drilling barge that had been working summers in Alaska since 1964, and assigned the mechanical engineer Jim McNary to lead a rapid overhaul that would enable the ship to deploy a robot kitted out with cameras and strobes at the end of a pipe string to move around the site and take newer, better pictures.

  McNary worked quickly and very quietly, as was his style, which earned him his office nickname, Silent Jim. He outfitted the ship with dynamic positioning to keep it on station and a heavy-lift system that was a smaller, lighter version of the one that would ultimately go on the Azorian mission ship. Steel pipes would be assembled into a string and hung from the derrick, then lowered 16,500 feet down into the ocean. There, a suite of machinery on the pipe string’s end could gather more detailed information.

  The ship’s most important job was to obtain better photos than the ones Halibut provided, but it wasn’t as if Graham’s engineers could just snatch some parts off the shelf and throw together a contraption to capture the kind of detail required, remotely, at three miles under the sea. There was no such camera. So John Parangosky went out and found a company that could build him one.

  • • •

  Joe Houston was barely awake at his desk inside the Lexington, Massachusetts, headquarters of Itek Corporation when John Wolfe, the company’s vice president for special projects, called to invite him to a lunch meeting. Houston was Itek’s chief optical engineer for underwater projects, and he had just finished testing a new submarine periscope the day before. He’d arrived home late the previous night, having driven straight from New London, where he’d departed the sub upon return to its base. Houston assumed he’d have some time to ease back into work before moving on to a new project. Wolfe had other ideas.

  It wasn’t often that Houston was called into the executive offices, and he’d never been summoned to see Wolfe, a burly bear of a man with wide shoulders and a thick mass of hair, whose primary responsibility was overseeing Itek’s secret government contracts.

  “I’ve got this problem,” Wolfe told the young engineer. “I know you know about periscopes and underwater optics and I have a job for you. We need to find some manganese nodules.” Houston had no idea what a manganese nodule was, but he sat attentively as Wolfe laid out the challenge—a US government client had asked him to develop a high-resolution camera system that could take precise, detailed photos in a “very hostile environment.”

  This hostile environment was the bottom of the ocean nearly 17,000 feet down. And the client needed to obtain photographs accurate to the millimeter so that it could build a model of the machine that would ultimately mine these nodules, which were rich in rare earth minerals.

  “You’re talking about three miles down,” Houston replied. The pressure alone would destroy most cameras, and even if one were put inside a housing sturdy enough that it wouldn’t be crushed, there was sure to be distortion in the images. And then there was the issue of lighting. If the goal was truly to obtain metric data three miles under the ocean, well, that couldn’t be done based on current technology.

  “That’s why I called you,” Wolfe replied.

  Houston was an engineer, and an ambitious one. A favorite saying of his, tossed around among engineers at the top levels of government contracting, was “The difficult we do tomorrow; the impossible might take a little longer.” He probed Wolfe for specifics, and the area he described had an oddly familiar shape—it was long and thin, rectangular but oblong, with rounded ends. “I just got off something that size,” he said. “You’re talking about something the size of a submarine.”

  Wolfe laughed and deflected the conversation back to the problem he wanted Houston to help him solve. On top of the project’s complexity, he said, the clients were in a huge rush, so Houston would need to begin immediately. He’d have six days to prepare a proposal that he would present personally, explaining how he’d pull this off.

  Houston wasn’t sure how to process it all. He was both excited and overwhelmed to try to solve what was objectively a preposterous problem. As he rose to leave, Wolfe handed over an official document from the client that he needed to sign. The form was embossed with the unmistakable logo of the Central Intelligence Agency and stated that the work he was signing on for was highly classified, and that he wasn’t to discuss it with anyone. Ever.

  One week later, Houston walked into a dark, windowless conference room on the second floor of Itek’s lavish headquarters. There, at the table, were Wolfe; Itek’s president, Frank Lindsay, a former OSS officer; and the client’s representatives, one of whom was a stocky man in a suit with slick-backed hair who was introduced only as John P.

  Standing in front of a whiteboard with a marker in his hand, Houston launched into his presentation, telling the men that the principal challenge of this task was the lighting: He needed to create a system of lights that would fully illuminate an area much larger than the beams, because as light is diminished outward from the center of a beam, objects on the periphery get distorted. Shadows also create distortion. And if this project required absolutely perfect images with zero distortion over an area as large as the one that was described to him, he had to illuminate it all equally, in flat, broad light.

  The solution was multiple lights and multiple cameras. It would be expensive, and he’d need to buy the lights from a very specific source.

  John P listened carefully and then approved the concept without hesitation. He also said that he needed the final product in six months, so that it could go to sea in the fall.

  Houston still wasn’t totally sure his concept would work. The slightest failure, even a microfracture, would cause a catastrophic implosion of the equipment. But he had the full financial and engineering support of the CIA. Mr. P assigned his chief scientist, Alex Holzer, and a second engineer, Floyd Alvarez, to provide Houston with whatever technical or logistical assistance he needed. And Houston was energized by the importance of his task—designing an entirely new optical system that would help open up a new frontier of natural resources, to the benefit of his country and the planet.

  Once a month, John P, Holzer, and Alvarez would arrive for review meetings with Houston and his bosses, and whenever someone questioned the engineer’s judgment, Parangosky found a way to reassure him. He recognized that the young man’s approach was ultraconservative, but utterly necessary to finish the job.

  Unlike his corporate work, Houston had no strict oversight on this project, and he didn’t have to keep detailed records—in fact, he was told not to. Similarly, when he needed a part, it just appeared, with no discussion of cost or process. When it came time to order the lamps, from a source in California, Houston wrote out a simple one-page request to purchase with the caveat that he needed the lamps as soon as possible. Someone, he wasn’t sure who, picked
them up and caught a plane to Boston. They were in his office by the next day, with no sign of a bill.

  Houston needed a way to test his concept. Behind his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts, was a small, shallow cranberry bog with a large tree limb arching over its center. He waded out to the center and placed seven two-by-two-foot square white panels mounted at forty-five degrees on stakes and pushed the stakes into the muddy bottom. The panels were set one foot apart, facing an extremely bright strobe-light source placed underwater at the edge of the bog. Houston then climbed the tree with his thirty-five-millimeter Pentax camera and, while sprawling precariously on the large limb, asked his fifteen-year-old son, Brant, to press a trigger to flash the strobe-light source. Using several different time exposures, he obtained plenty of sample images.

  A few days later, the CIA team returned to the dark room on the second floor and Houston laid the images out in front of John P, who picked up a magnifying glass and studied them intently. “Very nice,” he said. “But where did all these catfish come from?”

  Thereafter, it became known as the catfish solution.

  Once he handed his design off, Houston heard nothing more about it or how it was used. But he and Holzer stayed in contact and the CIA scientist encouraged him to write a technical paper on his innovative new optical system for deep-sea mining that he could present at the Marine Technology Society meeting held in Washington, DC. In March 1971, he met Holzer in Honolulu, where the two attended a seminar on underwater photo-optical applications. They hiked Diamond Head, ate out like old friends, toured the exhibits, and attended technical sessions on the development of underwater equipment and new techniques in underwater imaging. Houston had no idea at the time that he had designed a critical piece of the Azorian salvage project, and bolstered the cover story in the process.