The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  22

  A Minor Complication

  OCTOBER 1970

  In October, Manfred Krutein was sent to Hawaii to begin preparations for a mission aboard the Glomar II, a drillship that, as far as anyone knew, would be doing tests of some prototype-scale mining equipment as part of a new but mysterious commercial mining project.

  The Glomar II was already en route from Long Beach, and Krutein was instructed to rent an apartment in downtown Honolulu close to the office of RCA Communications, where telegrams from the ship would be sent. He was to wear a beeper at all times when away from the apartment, so that RCA could notify him of a message’s arrival, and was to never leave that beeper’s range. If the telegram was addressed to “Manfred Krutein, ocean mining engineer,” it was a fully open message and required no decoding. But if it was addressed to “M. Krutein, ocean mining engineer,” the telegram contained a hidden message and required decoding. In either case, Krutein was to call his local Agency contact, a mathematician from Parangosky’s team named Bob Schied—whom Krutein knew only as “Jim”—and suggest the two meet for a beer or to play cards, always at a new location.

  Krutein loved the cloak-and-dagger work especially, but when he’d told his wife about the assignment, Eva made a very reasonable demand: She and the two kids wanted to join him for this short-term assignment in paradise. The Agency was less enthusiastic about the idea. Ultimately, Parangosky decided that having a family around made Krutein even less suspicious, and as long as he could agree to certain very specific constraints, it was fine for him to take them along. The ground rules: The family could never meet any CIA representatives, they could never answer the telephone, and if it was deemed necessary to hold a meeting at the apartment, he’d have to get them all out, no matter what time of day or night.

  A week after his arrival, Krutein picked the family up at Honolulu Airport in a rented Toyota sedan and drove them back to their penthouse one-bedroom, two blocks from Waikiki Beach. He showed them around the nice but sparsely decorated apartment, which had a heavy-duty file cabinet with padlocks on every drawer, and explained that “the customer” paying for the mining project was very odd, and demanding. Krutein said that he would be on call twenty-four hours a day, could never travel outside the range of his beeper, and might have to clear the apartment on short notice. In addition, neither Eva nor the kids could answer the telephone. “Our customer does not want to be identified at this point,” he said.

  Hawaii was beautiful, so Eva and the kids were happy to spend their days exploring the island instead of sitting around the spartan environs of the apartment. Often, “Jim,” a security man with a dour expression and oversize ears, would arrive for meetings, held in the kitchen, next to the humming refrigerator. Krutein knew to prep for his arrival by closing windows, pulling shades, and turning up the radio to create background noise.

  In late October, the Glomar II made a public stop in Honolulu to resupply before heading to the Pacific to pretend to take mining samples at various locations, including the wreck site. The night before it left, the ship’s captain hosted a dinner for the crew and invited Krutein to Pier 8, where the harbor was abuzz with activity because of Aloha Week, the annual celebration of Hawaiian heritage. The tops of palm trees were spotlit for the occasion, and locals carried colorful Japanese lanterns, but the sight that got the most attention was the inky black Glomar II. Its hulking silhouette, especially the derrick that jutted up from the center of the hull, stood out among the harbor’s fleet of fishing boats, freighters, and catamarans.

  Once the Glomar II had arrived in port, Jim told Krutein to prepare for a meeting of the ship’s mission team—the Glomar II’s captain, plus key scientists, technicians, and Agency personnel, including Dr. Jack Stephenson, the chemist better known as Redjack, who would be leading the mission. The next day, eleven men arrived at sporadic intervals, either alone or in pairs, and took seats around his living room, half of them on the floor.

  Jim handed out an agenda, typed on sheets of white paper, and ran through the mission plan. Since the ship’s crew would include only a few Agency men, and minimal security, he wanted to be clear about threats and contingencies. The Soviets had thousands of spies embedded in American society, Jim warned. Certainly, they were here in Honolulu, too. Every man needed to watch his own back and to follow the security protocols precisely.

  Jim said that Soviets might send a ship to lurk and spy on the Glomar II and could even use false pretenses to come on board. “They know all kinds of tricks,” he said. “They could try to ask for medical help for a sick crew member as they have done on two previous occasions in order to come aboard American ships.” He recalled a time when a Soviet ship tried to entangle a rope around a ship’s propellers to keep it in place.

  Jim explained that Krutein was to serve three key roles during the Hawaii operation. He was first and foremost the project’s ocean-mining expert. His job was to talk openly about the industry, as he’d already been doing at conferences around the world. During the time that the Glomar II was at sea, he was also to be the communications link between the ship and the mainland. Because he could travel freely without suspicion, he would receive the messages from RCA and make arrangements to pass them to Jim. And he was to be the local coordinator, a glorified admin assistant who booked hotel rooms, rented cars, arranged for meeting spaces, and ferried around “special guests of the customer” who came to town.

  A government man whom Krutein didn’t recognize pressed him about his time in Hawaii so far. Had anyone questioned him about his reasons for being there? Did he notice the same people in unusual locations? “If you see the same person twice, start getting concerned,” Jim said. “If you see him three times, you know you’re onto something.”

  • • •

  It would take at least a week for the Glomar II to reach the target area, eighteen hundred miles north and west of Hawaii, because the ship couldn’t just sail a straight line there. It had to appear to be working at various sites, and the crew scheduled three or four potential stops en route where the ship would pause to pretend to deploy its equipment and retrieve nodule samples.

  Back in Honolulu, Krutein assumed he’d have a week of quiet, and he was looking forward to a break from the stress of meetings with paranoid spies who had him convinced that he was always a tiny mistake away from foiling the largest covert operation in US history. But the ship hadn’t even been out of port a day when Jim called, requesting an urgent meeting. Ten minutes later, he arrived, clearly tense. His brow was sweaty, and he pulled two chairs next to the refrigerator.

  Jim had made a huge mistake. He’d forgotten to give Redjack the underwater navigation charts that showed the precise location of the Soviet wreck. Without them, the crew had only geographic coordinates, which were imprecise enough that they could lead to days of fruitless searching for an object they could hone in on immediately using the charts. He’d sent urgent word to the Glomar II to stop, and now they needed to figure out a way to get the charts out to the ship as quickly as possible.

  Krutein unlocked the heavy cabinet and pulled out a set of nautical charts to check the ship’s position. It was just about two hundred miles north of Hawaii. That was close enough to reach in a high-speed Navy vessel, but to do that would blow the Glomar’s cover. The other option was to fly over the ship in a plane and drop the package by parachute, but that seemed too risky, considering the rough seas and the very real possibility that the package would miss the ship and fall into the ocean. And poor weather was coming, which ruled out a return to port.

  What about a helicopter? Krutein pulled his phone book out of another drawer and found the listings for commercial helicopter services. He started with the first.

  “Do you have a pilot who could fly at least two hundred uninterrupted miles in a row and back?” he asked. The answer was an unequivocal no, and he got the same reply from the next few listings, until one operator who c
ouldn’t do it thought he knew someone who would.

  When Krutein arrived at the office of Eric Hatcher—“a tall, blond, Scandinavian-type man in his thirties,” he later wrote—the pilot was already studying the flight plan on a set of large charts that lay butterflied on his desk. Hatcher was retired Navy and said that his chopper—“my good pal Jenny”—had a total range of two hundred miles.

  The ship is two hundred miles away, Krutein replied. The helicopter’s range was basically half of what they needed.

  Hatcher didn’t scoff at that number. There was a way, he said. It was risky, but he was fairly certain that he could pull it off, provided the weather was decent. He could fly the helicopter with a single passenger to carry the package, plus an extra fuel drum in the jump seat. Once at the ship, they’d land, refuel, and leave the empty drum behind. “But the ship can’t go any farther,” he said. “It has to wait for us.”

  Being a CIA officer, Jim couldn’t go. Krutein would have to take the plans. And his anxiety about that prospect wasn’t helped by Hatcher’s casual warning that if the ship were to move beyond two hundred miles, even a little, they’d run out of gas and have to “get out and swim.”

  Back in Tysons Corner, Parangosky was furious. He blamed Schied. On an operation this sensitive, that single mistake could ruin everything. He decided that Schied would be fired from the program after finishing up in Hawaii, then transferred back to headquarters for reassignment.

  And given no better option, he approved the helicopter mission.

  As the guy in charge of the cover story, Walt Lloyd was angry, too. Delivering the plans introduced a number of bad scenarios, any one of which could spoil his elaborate ruse. He’d learned on the U-2 mission that the best way to handle very sensitive information, even in perilous environments, was to be as low-key as possible. He used to send unarmed CIA couriers to pick up the film after U-2 flights and fly it back via commercial jet to the United States for analysis. “I want you to walk through the forest and not disturb any of the leaves,” he told the men.

  Of course, the situation in Hawaii was entirely different. The urgent hire of an uncleared private pilot to deliver top secret plans via helicopter across the Pacific was the exact opposite of “disturbing no leaves.” It was pouring kerosene on the leaves and setting them on fire. But what choice did any of them have? The flight would go forward, and Parangosky, Lloyd, and the entire Azorian leadership would sit back east, sweating every moment.

  • • •

  The next morning, Krutein left home at five A.M., telling his wife he was flying out to visit the mining ship and would be back sometime after dark. Jim had already arranged with the Navy to ensure that the flight would be tracked by radar and that a rescue team would be standing by off the coast to pick Hatcher and Krutein up if they should happen to run out of fuel and be forced to bail out. He met Krutein in the parking lot outside the apartment and gave him three things to deliver to the Glomar II: a hard-case tube with the charts inside, a bag of mail for the ship’s crew, and a collapsible red rubber raft painted with a material that reflected radar, making it easy to locate in a search.

  The sun had yet to rise when Krutein reached the airport and found Hatcher doing final safety checks. They reviewed the evacuation plan, which wasn’t complicated: “Open the door, throw the raft into the water, jump out, and swim for it,” Hatcher said. “Don’t drown. Avoid sharks. Wait for help.”

  Space in the two-seat cockpit was tight, as both Hatcher and Krutein had to make room for the metal tank, which stunk of Jet A, the pungent aviation gas. Hatcher lifted off and flew over the seventy-two-mile-wide Kaieie Channel to Kauai, where they touched down in a field for long enough that a grizzled, middle-aged Hawaiian with a limp could top off the fuel. From there, they went northeast, over the towering green cliffs of the Napali Coast, which rise to three thousand feet, and then out over the sea, straight north for two hundred miles—heading, Krutein thought, “for a tiny ship in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean.”

  For minutes that dragged like hours, they flew a few hundred feet over the slate-colored water, Krutein fighting the urge to fixate on the fuel-gauge needle, which ticked slowly downward.

  “Watch out for the ship!” Hatcher yelled. “Look east. I’ll look west.”

  It was unsettling to fly along seeing nothing but water in every direction. Krutein stared ahead, where he knew the ship should be, where he desperately wanted it to appear—and then it did, a small dark spot that grew to “a ship the size of a toy,” and then finally to an enormous metal island, populated by men in hard hats who waved emphatically as the chopper circled, dipped, and landed on the giant yellow “H” of the helipad.

  The mission leaders greeted the men with champagne, and Krutein handed the mail bag and the tube—once he’d signed the receipt certifying the transfer of secret documents—to the captain, who invited them inside for a lunch of filet mignon, green beans, potatoes, and chocolate ice cream.

  After lunch, Hatcher and Krutein climbed back into the chopper. It felt twice as spacious without the stinking metal tank between them, and Krutein, who was physically and emotionally drained by the tension of the experience, fell asleep and didn’t wake up until they were just off the coast of Kauai, where thick gray clouds cloaked the coasts, enveloping the three-thousand-foot cliffs. Because he couldn’t see the mountains between them and safety, Hatcher would have to fly high enough to clear them, and that extra stress on the chopper was going to push the fuel near exhaustion, again.

  Ten extremely hairy minutes later, he pointed to an opening in the cloud cover. “I can see Lihue!” he said. “Ain’t we lucky?”

  When Krutein returned the raft and the receipt to Jim back at Honolulu Airport, the officer admitted that the whole thing had been terrifying from afar, especially on the return, when the helicopter vanished from radar just off the coast of Kauai.

  • • •

  A week later, Krutein was at lunch with his wife and a Buddhist who had been mentoring her when his beeper went off. He excused himself and went to RCA, where he was handed a cable addressed to “M. Krutein, ocean mining engineer.” He called Jim and arranged to meet him at a café, where following prearranged protocol the two pretended to be old friends who’d just happened to run into each other. They sat at a table and, when the waitress brought two oversize menus, used them as shields so that Krutein could pass the cable, folded like a letter, to Jim, who slipped it inside his long sleeve and said he wasn’t really hungry after all.

  This process repeated itself every few days while the ship was on station, with Krutein stealing off suddenly, often while out or eating with his wife, whose patience was beginning to fray. On November 2, an unusually large group of CIA men—five of the thirty who’d decamped to Hawaii for the Glomar II’s operations—gathered at the apartment to discuss a concern of the security team that, while remote, could not be dismissed. According to the latest cable, several Soviet trawlers had shadowed the Glomar II as it cruised north, and one in particular had gotten very close and was obviously photographing its activities.

  It could well be just industrial espionage, the spies explained. The Soviets weren’t just interested in military secrets, and they’d surely have taken an interest in ocean mining, if they had any sense there was money to be made in it. But if they had been tipped off that the mining story was just a cover, and were suspicious of the Glomar’s motives, they’d have men on land waiting for it to return with whatever data had been gathered out there.

  Jim proposed an elaborate trap. When they arranged to meet for the photographs and data from the Glomar II, as scheduled, they could do it in a way that would reveal or possibly even smoke out Soviet spies who might be watching. He instructed Krutein to rent a box truck with two doors in the rear, as well as two station wagons with tinted windows. Krutein would meet the ship in port, receive the boxes to be shipped back to the mainland, and carry them a
way in the truck. He should leave the port in a convoy with the two wagons, one in front, one in the rear, each filled with armed security officers. In total, twenty-four men would be watching and protecting him and the documents.

  Krutein’s face went white at that figure. Why would he need twenty-four armed guards?

  Jim explained that a KGB team had recently intercepted documents on a box truck back east, by staging an accident in an intersection, crashing into the truck’s rear hard enough to force the doors open. When the driver got out to summon help, KGB agents rushed in and stole the boxes as the truck’s driver watched helplessly.

  If they were after the documents on the Glomar, Jim said, they might be lured into trying something similar. “Manfred,” he said with some gravity. “That’s the moment to find out if we continue or stop the raising of the sub.”

  • • •

  Shortly after sunrise on November 17, Krutein drove his Toyota to the pier and parked just behind the truck and wagons, which he’d parked there the day before. He crossed the gangway and boarded the ship, where Jim and twenty-two men sat in the galley drinking coffee.

  Jim pointed to four cardboard boxes in the corner. In six minutes, those boxes would be carried out and loaded onto the truck. Krutein should take his time walking out behind them, looking as casual and unconcerned as possible, then get into the truck, and at 10:02, fire up the engine and leave. Five minutes later, at 10:07, he would pull into a restaurant called Koa.

  And that’s what he did. At 10:07, Krutein turned the truck into the lot, which was completely filled with cars. Just as he arrived, a tiny Opel hatchback pulled out, opening a space. Krutein parked the truck, locked it, and went inside. Like the lot, the place was filled when he entered, with every table taken, and just like in the lot, a table opened precisely when he needed it. Jim and two other officers arrived and joined him, and for thirty minutes the four men talked and laughed as security teams outside watched the truck for any signs that the Soviets were watching. At 10:40, they paid and left.