The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  The Explorer’s design was novel in many ways, with some of its features highly concerning to John Graham, who looked at every unique system as one more way to sink his ship. The fact that the moon pool left a vast hole in the middle, with only two narrow sidewalls holding the bow to the stern, was of particular worry. In fact, it gave him nightmares.

  This required further study, and Graham had the nation at his fingertips. Carl Duckett had built the DDS&T with the idea that the architects and engineers who were asked to help win the Cold War through innovation should be given any resource possible.

  For several months, one of Graham’s old MIT classmates, a hydrodynamicist named Jacques Hadler, flew back and forth from the David Taylor Model Basin at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, outside Washington, to meet with specialists who’d been given the sole job of assuring John Graham that the moon pool wouldn’t destroy his ship. They were to study what would happen when the moon pool had been flooded and was full of millions of gallons of water sloshing back and forth.

  Hadler, then fifty-four, was a specialist in propeller design and had contributed to the design of many of the propellers that served US ships and submarines throughout the Cold War. He needed to establish two things for Graham: the effects of that water sloshing around the pool, and the limits of the ship—the maximum seas in which it could operate.

  The model basin was accustomed to testing ship models in what they called “regular waves”—waves of a common length and height. But Hadler knew the ship wouldn’t be working just in regular, predictable seas. He was able to increase the intensity and unpredictability of the waves in the model basin to more specifically mimic the conditions of the Pacific in the summer, when the ocean was calmest but when so-called rogue waves were also a threat.

  The work was so sensitive that Hadler had to carry his calculations and drawings personally to the West Coast to deliver the results. At the model basin, only technical director Alan Powell knew of his work. And Powell also wanted regular briefings, which required that the CIA build and bug a special room for the sole purpose of holding their meetings. What was most awkward for Hadler was that his own supervisor, the manager between himself and Powell, wasn’t cleared, but he knew enough to recognize that there was a reason for this. He never asked questions when one of his top engineers flew off every other week for six months to a mystery destination. Or, upon his return, met their department head in a room he wasn’t allowed to enter.

  When Hadler’s work was completed—when the CIA and John Graham were satisfied that they’d studied the potential for wave damage in the moon pool to the extent that was possible—he was thanked for his service and asked to pack all notes and files, as well as the models he’d made, into boxes that a special moving company would pick up and take to secure storage.

  And then he never heard from the program office, or the CIA, again.

  • • •

  About a month after the Tishman office opened, on a rare day in which John Graham and his senior engineers were all in Los Angeles and not flying around to contractors, a “representative” of Summa Corporation stopped by and announced that the company was going to host a media reception that night in the office and that everyone was invited to stay.

  Caterers rolled in steam trays and set up a bar. Reporters poured in and chatted freely with Paul Reeve and Manfred Krutein while nibbling at enormous shrimp plucked from sprawling beds of ice. Reeve played host and interrupted the cocktail hum to give a brief speech. He held up a small plastic box with a dull gray lump inside and told the media that this was a manganese nodule picked up on a recent test by the Glomar II.

  That trip was an important one, Reeve told the crowd. It proved that a miniature mining prototype designed by some of the men in this room could pick up nodules. More important, testing of those nodules, from a location in the central Pacific where they were found to be in great abundance, showed that they contained enough manganese, nickel, and cobalt to justify going forward.

  I’m here to tell you, Paul Reeve said, that Howard Hughes is ready to go mining, hopefully by the summer of 1974.

  27

  Accountability Matters

  From its earliest stages, Azorian was under fire for its costs. A frequent and easily understood misconception about black programs is that they are free of oversight, and likely if not certain to go wildly off the rails. But even covert programs must justify their costs. The first level of responsibility is internal, with the CIA’s own budget office. Program managers go to this finance group to ask for funding and must be able to explain and justify the amounts they’re requesting. Within the larger US government, people are cleared as needed in the process of requisitioning funds.

  Azorian’s security staff didn’t just clear contractors. They had to open channels around Washington so that conversations about funding could actually be conducted. A small team was cleared at the General Accounting Office to follow the money, filling a critical oversight role—to make sure that whatever funds went into the project were spent as intended, and that the trail could be retraced if necessary, in case any of it was called into question later.

  At the direction of the Agency, Hughes Tool adopted a strategic posture through the contracting process. It said little but hid nothing. On January 15, 1972, the same month the HMB-1 was completed, Hughes Tool issued a brief press release officially announcing its key partners for the mining project. “The Hughes Tool Company, Oil Tool Division, Houston, Texas, has announced that it is utilizing the Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, Inc., in the development of hardware for its Deep Ocean Mining Operation,” the release stated, and then also mentioned that Global Marine was building the “surface ship” and “will operate the mining system for Hughes Tool upon its completion and is coordinating the overall construction activities.”

  Western Gear, in Washington State, was assigned to build the giant gimbaled platform. Honeywell, in Seattle, was picked to develop a number of the key system components, including the station keeping and sonar, as well as data-processing systems for Clementine. The idea was to put controls for the ship and the capture vehicle all in the same room, on the same console, and it was all based on the very cutting edge of computing power at that time. Specifically, Honeywell would use six computers, each with thirty-two kilobytes of core memory, and a suite of peripherals, including magnetic tapes, alphanumeric CRT displays, card readers, line printers, and plotters. The system’s primary responsibilities were station keeping for the ship, operation of the capture vehicle, and data handling. Nothing like the Explorer’s station keeping—which communicated with the ship’s main propeller and bow and stern thrusters to automatically keep the ship in position over the target—had ever been deployed.

  Honeywell’s Dick Abbey signed three separate contracts with Lockheed—for acoustic sensors, dynamic positioning, and the control and software systems for Clementine. He put his old college friend Hank Van Calcar, who had black program experience from his work on missiles with TRW, on dynamic position, and when Van Calcar went for his initial meeting with the security staff, he was briefed, but not fully. They described the target only in terms of dimensions, calling it “cylindrical.” Van Calcar knew better than to ask questions, but once he did some math, the shape looked more and more strange. So he went to Abbey. “What the heck is it we’re going after?” he said. Abbey laughed. “You mean they didn’t tell you?”

  The five diesel-electric drives would be made by General Electric, an obvious choice, considering the company had been making Global Marine’s switchboards, motors, and hydraulics for years, on all of the big ships. The smaller hydraulic drives, for the pipe-handling system, came from Vickers via a dealer in LA named Paul Monroe. These pumps, though, drove Graham nuts. Flex in the system kept tearing the motors apart, and finally Crooke convinced his architect to switch to a different pump, but not before smoothing over a potential complication, when Monroe couldn’t un
derstand why this one job was exhausting so much of his supply, causing him to put other clients on a waiting list for pumps. Monroe was annoyed, and to appease a dealer he’d worked with for years, Graham asked Parangosky to clear Monroe. After that, the problem went away. The pumps kept coming.

  • • •

  No single component of the system gave engineers and managers more worry, over a prolonged period, than the pipe string. Mechanically, the string wasn’t complex—it was just tapered steel pipe—but the stresses it would be under, the loads it would be asked to carry, made this the most difficult piece of the entire operation. Hughes Tool Company was selected to make the pipe, in part because it would make no narrative sense for an ocean-mining company owned by Howard Hughes to buy its pipe from someone else. But Hughes Tool was also the best source. The Hughes family made its fortune in mining, by manufacturing drill bits, and understood both drill pipes and metallurgy.

  The original CIA task force had concluded in 1970 that it was impossible, given current technology and metallurgy, to manufacture a pipe string strong enough to carry a maximum fail-safe load of 17,126,000 pounds, but when Global Marine took over the engineering study, Curtis Crooke’s engineers convinced the Agency that, while the job was daunting, it wasn’t impossible.

  The closest anyone could come to the kind of pipe required to handle that load was the one used for the sixteen-inch gun barrels on World War II battleships, which hadn’t been made in decades, meaning that there weren’t any sixteen-inch-gun makers still around to help. There was, however, a metallurgist who specialized in gun barrel technology at the Watervliet Arsenal—home of the Army’s artillery development. The Agency asked the Army to bring the man to Washington with virtually no advance warning, and without telling him or his superiors why he was so urgently needed at the Pentagon. All he knew was that it was a matter of great importance to national security.

  Two of Paul Evans’ officers picked the man up at the Pentagon and, following the tradecraft for covert meetings—using unusual routes, with frequent backtracks—they delivered him to a secret location to meet with some of the team’s engineers. The metallurgist was exactly who they needed. He helped the team determine the material, manufacturing process, testing, and contractors who might be able to produce the components—without ever learning what the pipe was for.

  Three different steel companies combined to pour, forge, and trepan 590 rough-machined forgings, each one thirty feet long and made of a standard alloy of steel and vanadium, which increased the strength, toughness, and ductility. These segments all had a five-inch-diameter bore, but they came in six different body diameters, all of them tapered, and with a unique thread pattern that allowed the pipe to reach maximum torque with just one and a half turns of a special wrench on the ship’s rig floor.

  The pipe was tested first at one-eighth scale, using a custom-designed, computer-controlled stress-testing machine, and when that showed the string would hold up to the conditions of the actual operation, it was sent to Hughes Tool’s facility in Houston for final machining and coating. There, the sections were also color-coded based on size.

  This scale testing, though, didn’t provide enough assurance to the engineers back in LA. Those who worried about the string’s tensile strength weren’t comfortable doing the first full-scale proof test in the open ocean, with a stolen Soviet submarine on the end, so Crooke convinced Parangosky that they needed a full-scale test. There was no proof-test machine in existence large enough to do the job, so Mr. P had no choice but to approve the design and manufacture of a custom system capable of subjecting the string to a maximum load of 21,460,000 pounds.

  The job of building the largest tensile test machine in history fell to the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and on January 30, 1972, a design engineer “with much trepidation,” according to a CIA report, “initiated the first full-load test of the pipe and machine.” He was nervous for many reasons, especially because there were no existing standards to set measurements at the required stress levels and the machine had to be designed to (hopefully) absorb the impact of whatever happened if the pipe failed under tension. It was a success. And when the machine was moved to Houston and installed at the Hughes factory, it worked again. Every single one of the 584 pipe sections passed the test. Subsequently, they were combined into doubles and, in October of 1973, loaded onto trains and shipped to the port in Long Beach.

  28

  We Need More Proof

  SPRING 1972

  Walt Lloyd’s job wasn’t just to develop the cover story. Once the edifice had been constructed, he had to protect it, keeping an eye out for potential holes in the story while anticipating problems that could later arise and put the whole program in jeopardy. And a part of that was keeping an eye on his contractors.

  He had been through this process three times before. The U-2, Oxcart, and Corona programs all worked because the players conducted their roles in the cover story as if what they were doing was real. The best contractors were the ones who didn’t actually know they were playacting, of course, but operational security depended on keeping those who did know in line, every step of the way.

  The CIA ran covert operations, but the Agency was subject to governmental oversight and Lloyd took that responsibility very seriously. He kept a very close watch on legal issues, and when concerns were raised about potential tax complications resulting from confusion over the ship’s true ownership—it was, ultimately, a CIA ship, even though everyone needed to believe Howard Hughes owned it—Lloyd set out to head those problems off at the pass.

  The man in charge of Hughes’s legal affairs was Chester Davis, a sturdy, intimidating man who protected his boss’s interests with fervor. Davis, according to Hughes’s longtime PR man, was “an action figure, a volcano bubbling under the surface, a legal mind with a Machiavellian bent. . . . Victory was his goal. To him, failure was intolerable.”

  Davis wasn’t just the defender of Howard Hughes’s businesses; he was his personal counsel and a director of Summa Corporation, the company that held all of the mogul’s remaining corporate assets after he sold off the Hughes Tool drill-bit business for 300 million dollars in 1972.

  Along with Bill Gay and Raymond Holliday, Davis was essentially running Howard Hughes’s affairs. Although Davis kept an office in Washington, he worked primarily out of the lavish Lower Manhattan offices of his firm, Davis & Cox, which he’d opened with the huge fees garnered by his work with Hughes.

  That was where Lloyd went to see him, to discuss the matter of the Azorian vessel’s ownership.

  Like his boss, John Parangosky, Lloyd didn’t arrange his appointments in advance. That only gives a person a chance to dodge you, or plan some subterfuge, so as he always did, Lloyd simply showed up in the ornate lobby of Davis & Cox, near Wall Street, and told the receptionist that he needed to see Chester Davis.

  He was, like the best security officers, calm, clearheaded, and seemingly unflappable, the kind of person who can keep a straight face no matter the circumstances. Lloyd projected a quiet importance and wasn’t a man you brushed off easily. Davis’ secretary sensed that right away. She sent Lloyd through to see Davis, who presided over Hughes’s interests from a spectacular corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the entire southern tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the waterfronts of Bayonne and Jersey City. Davis was an immigrant himself, the son of an Italian mother and Algerian father who’d died when he was young. He arrived in the United States with his mother as a twelve-year-old named Caesar Simon, on a boat that sailed right past Lady Liberty, and he often looked out at the statue and remembered how far he’d come.

  “Who are you?” Davis said, as this strange man with an unfamiliar name strode in.

  Lloyd explained that he was a representative of the Agency affiliated with a certain mining operation that Davis was obviously familiar with. When Davis asked for credentia
ls, Lloyd replied that, for security reasons, he carried only cover identification.

  “Well, how do I know you’re who you say you are, then?” Davis asked.

  “Because I’m telling you who I am.”

  Davis stared at the man a moment. “Okay. Tell me this: Who’s the senior partner in your law firm?”

  This was a clever question. The answer would be obvious to anyone who actually worked at the CIA, but an impersonator would likely not know the name of the Agency’s general counsel.

  Lloyd smiled. “It’s Larry Houston.”

  At that, Davis warmed up. He fished a little further, checking Lloyd’s knowledge of the Summa Corporation, but he was increasingly certain that the visitor was who he claimed to be. He recommended they go for a walk outside to discuss the ship’s ownership, then returned to his office to wrap the meeting up with a glass of sherry, served in crystal rocks glasses.

  “One more thing,” Davis asked before Lloyd left. “Are you collecting any nodules?”

  Lloyd replied that yes, they’d collected some nodules.

  “Good,” Davis replied. “The only problem I saw in this whole operation is that if you pretended to be doing something, and you didn’t do it, it could be considered fraud.”

  Lloyd lingered a moment. This was a smart man, a pure cover officer. And when he got back to the program office in Virginia, he went straight to Parangosky’s office.

  “JP,” he said, “you have got to show nodules.”

  “What do you mean?” Parangosky replied.

  “Well, I don’t know how many nodules you collected, but I want some.”

  “You can’t have them,” Parangosky said.

  “Goddamn it, JP—this is what I want. I want them in glass cases and I want every one of the men admitted to this program to have one on his desk. I want some of the security guys out there in Redwood City to get one, and go to the bar and show some other guys a nodule in front of the goddamn bartender. And then let the bartender play with it.”