by Josh Dean
All three showed up the first day in matching civilian disguises—dark blue pants, dark blue shirts, and dark blue duck-billed caps. The officers also couldn’t help but act in the formal manner that had been imprinted into their personalities, carrying themselves with unnecessary rigor and following ridiculous rules of propriety. When the CIA’s senior security officer on the site witnessed the commander walking in front of the two captains and holding a door open as they walked through, he snapped and pulled the men aside, telling them that, with all due respect, if he saw them do that again he would “deck them.”
Officially, the Navy men were in Philadelphia as advisers, but their actual purpose was to monitor construction for skeptics in the hierarchy, to be sure that the CIA was really doing what it claimed to be doing—and to prove what they already suspected: that this audacious plan cooked up by spies was never going to work.
Shortly after the keel was laid, doubts about the Explorer’s engineering within the Navy ranks forced a stoppage in construction. Since the funds originated from Navy budgets, the branch had a right to vet the plans again to be sure that money wasn’t being wasted. The Navy sent Rear Admiral Nathan “Sonny” Sonenshein, along with a staff, to inspect the operation and make sure the money wasn’t going to some CIA boondoggle. Sonenshein was a respected, open-minded officer who’d taken command of the Bureau of Ships in 1970, making him the Navy’s top shipbuilder.
Down in Virginia, Parangosky fretted. Fully aware that a bad report from Sonenshein could slow if not cancel the project, Parangosky instructed Crooke and Graham to cooperate with the admiral while sharing as little information as possible. They were to allow him to tour the ship and speak with workers, but all questions were to be answered with the fewest words possible. “Just say, ‘Yes, sir; No, sir; or I don’t know, sir,’” Parangosky instructed.
For an entire week, construction paused while Sonny toured the ship, attended briefings, and probed Graham and his engineers. Then he returned to the Pentagon and reported to a frustrated command that not only was the ship well designed and on schedule, but that if the Navy were attempting to do the same thing, they’d be at least three years behind. “He went back and told them he thought it was slick,” Curtis Crooke later said. Not long after, Sonny resigned his commission and joined Global Marine.
The project’s pace was the clearest evidence possible of why the job was given to the CIA and not the Navy. Graham’s mining vessel was arguably the most complicated ship ever built, and its keel was laid less than a year after he started sketching the design. And a little more than a year after construction began, the ship was finished.
30
Come One, Come All!
OCTOBER 1972
In late October 1972, contractors, yard workers, and select members of the media and their families received flyers from Sun Shipbuilding inviting them to “Family Day, featuring the launching of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, constructed for Global Marine.” The event’s ceremonial host was Mrs. Zelma Lesch, wife of James Lesch, the Summa Corp. CEO who’d first agreed to link Howard Hughes to Global Marine and the Azorian project. The invitation included a short description of the enormous ship rising in the yard—designated Sun Hull #661—as well as a brief list of specs.
The event was to be held on November 4, from eleven A.M. to one thirty P.M., and would include an open-house tour of the US Navy destroyer USS Lowry, anchored nearby; an employee arts and crafts exhibit; and the official launching of John Graham’s ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE), at high noon. Refreshments would be provided, as well as “balloons for children.”
The launching of a ship is often a misnomer, and that was certainly the case with the Explorer. The version of Graham’s ship that was slid down the ramp and into the murky Delaware River was only tack welded, meaning it was only barely able to float without sinking. At that point, the ship was just a hull, with the inner bottom, wing walls, main engines, generators, tunnel thrusters, shafts, motors, and a partial amount of bilge and ballast piping. It had at best 50 percent of the wiring installed, a portion of the fire-main system, and some but not all of the sewage tanks.
Still, it had taken Graham and his team, as well as the full might of the Sun Ship engineering shop, working full bore six days a week since the previous December, just to get to this point. Pressure had been intensifying throughout construction, with “early 1973” set as the delivery target to the client, and every time some change or complication added a day to the schedule, John Parangosky’s patience frayed a little more. To help reassure himself, and the nags at the Pentagon, he added a new layer of oversight. On the recommendation of a CIA naval architecture adviser, Parangosky called Larry Glosten, the designer of the Hughes Mining Barge 1 (which was now hiding Clementine’s construction out in Redwood City), in to help.
Every few weeks, Glosten would fly from Seattle to Philadelphia and carry out a system of numerical progress reporting that drove John Graham nuts—but which accurately predicted the completion and cost of every major step along the way, including the launch.
• • •
All of the key contractors, as well as the media and several undercover CIA officers, attended the launch, held on one of the few days when work on the Explorer actually paused. Paul Reeve spoke first, on behalf of Summa Corporation, standing under a gray sky on a raised dais in front of the ten-story ship, painted black except for the enormous white letters that spelled out HUGHES GLOMAR EXPLORER. Reeve turned over the microphone to Curtis Crooke, who cited the work of John Graham and his engineers, as well as Sun Ship, and then apologized that Howard Hughes himself wasn’t in attendance. “He’s always in seclusion,” Crooke joked. “But who knows? Maybe he’s watching us from around the corner.”
Finally, it was time to christen the ship, a job that fell to Mrs. Lesch, who ascended a ladder in a wildly patterned overcoat, her stiff arch of skunk-striped hair standing firm in the breeze. In her hand was a bottle of bubbly, for the ritual champagne bath—a ceremonial act that could have gone better. “Mrs. Lesch was a bit late with her swing as the ship had begun to pull away before she splattered the bottle,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Mrs. Lesch missed twice and looked unsure of what to do until someone rushed up with a third bottle and hurled it at the ship’s side, where it exploded with a pop that caused the crowd to erupt.
That night there was a dinner at the Radley Run Country Club, in West Chester, and as a parting gift, everyone in attendance was given a small plastic box that contained a single manganese nodule about the size of a red potato—each one sucked up from the floor of the Pacific in the wire-and-bucket contraption that John Parsons had designed for Sea Scope. Some attendees also got a sterling silver medal embossed with the ship’s silhouette, commissioned by Global Marine and paid for by the Agency at Walt Lloyd’s direction.
31
Surprise, Surprise
Curtis Crooke was himself an engineer, and a very good one. But he’d thrived at Global Marine as much for being a popular manager who excelled at selling the innovative products his company was turning out—both to funders of these projects and to the commercial market. As Global grew, so did Crooke’s reputation and salary, and as the Azorian program came together, it did not escape him that the company was turning out some truly remarkable technology on the federal government’s dime. This was technology that could and probably would revolutionize offshore drilling and would certainly have value after the program was completed. This was something he needed to think more about, but he just didn’t have time.
Toward the end of 1972, Crooke called John Hollett, a young naval architect and classmate of Chuck Cannon’s who’d worked for Graham on some previous projects but left in 1969 to join a shipyard back east. Crooke had always liked Hollett, who was colorful and a little brash and, unlike so many of the more taciturn engineers, enjoyed wandering the building and talking to whoever might be around. He especially liked visi
ting Crooke.
Crooke recalled hearing from Chuck Cannon that his old friend Hollett had left ship design to pursue his MBA, and that combination of business and technical expertise, Crooke thought, made him the perfect candidate to come out and help him market the technology from the mining program. “We’re working on a project for Howard Hughes,” Crooke told Hollett. “We don’t have anyone working on what we can do with this stuff we’re developing when it’s over. So come on out here and head up our new business group.”
Hollett moved back to LA and into a cubicle at the Tishman Building, where he was impressed with Crooke’s beautiful new office, which had a teak desk, a teak conference table, and sweeping views of both LAX runways. Hollett could tell that the mining operation was all-consuming for Crooke, and the two rarely communicated for the first few months. Hollett had what seemed to be full autonomy, and once he’d devoured all of the engineering and technical specs of the Hughes Glomar Explorer and its many impressive and innovative features—dynamic positioning, a gimbaled platform, a semiautomatic pipe-handling system—he began to consider what clients might be able to afford such machinery, and, well, he couldn’t think of many.
Very few companies would have a need for a ship this elaborate and specific, at the cost required to operate it, especially when he ruled out Global’s competitors in the offshore drilling market, whom Crooke and Graham would never want to share their proprietary technology with. In Hollett’s mind, there was only one good answer: Uncle Sam.
Hollett asked the office administrative assistant to book him a trip to Washington, and he made the rounds of all the major agencies and departments that he thought might have interest in this remarkable ship—primarily military groups that worked in deep water, such as the Supervisor of Salvage and the Defense Logistics Agency. The meetings went well; several groups showed interest over the course of his four-day tour, and Hollett flew home on a Friday feeling pretty darn good about himself.
First thing Monday, Crooke called and asked to see Hollett immediately. He sounded angry.
Hollett wandered over to his boss’s office suite and found only his secretary. He asked where Crooke was.
He’s at the program office, the secretary said.
“What the hell is that?” Hollett answered. He’d never heard of “the program office.”
It’s in the Hughes Aircraft building, she replied, and gave him directions over to the Summa tower on Sepulveda. Hollett drove over, got into the elevator, and exited on the fifth floor. This place was—different. Much less luxurious than Tishman. It felt almost industrial, and the program office itself had peculiar security—thick double-glass doors and a secretary behind glass who buzzed him in and through a second set of doors into a hall lined with small, spartan offices, each one with minimal decoration, an uncomfortable chair, and a small metal trash can sitting next to a steel-case desk. These looked like workspaces for entry-level clerks, and Hollett nearly fell over when he saw Crooke, the cocky boss he adored, sitting in one of them.
“This is your office?” he asked.
Crooke gestured for Hollett to come in and asked him to close the door. He was not happy. “You fucked this whole thing up by wandering around Washington going to see the Supervisor of Salvage at the Navy,” he said. “As soon as you left he called me and said, ‘What the hell is this guy doing here trying to sell us our own technology?’” Crooke said, dumbfounded. “You keep stumbling around and you’re going to screw this up. I need to show you something.”
Crooke led a very confused Hollett down the hall into a conference room that was completely dark except for a set of spotlights pointing straight down at the table. The lights illuminated a large collage of grainy photos that, together, contained the unmistakable outline of a wrecked submarine.
“Goddamnit, this is what we’re going after,” Crooke said. “Not manganese. The CIA is our customer, not Howard Hughes. Now we need to get you briefed up so you can do your job without ruining everything.”
32
Ongoing Resistance
AUGUST 1972
As far as the contractors were concerned, Azorian was a go, but back in Washington the program’s status remained under constant threat. By the summer of 1972, ExCom had a new chairman, Kenneth Rush, who had succeeded David Packard as deputy secretary of defense. An unheralded part of Parangosky’s job was to shelter those working on Azorian from the noise and political interference in the capitol, and over July and August of 1972, he, CIA director Richard Helms, and the NURO leaders were regularly called upon to defend and justify their work. Ongoing worries about the program’s escalating costs were bolstered on August 4, when Rush handed Helms copies of three separate memos—from Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Assistant Secretary of Defense Albert Hall, and Defense Intelligence Agency director Vice Admiral Vincent de Poix—stating that the actual value of the potential intel gain from the K-129 was less than originally argued and that all three had begun to think that the program should not go forward. Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff joined the chorus of dissent, telling Kissinger and the powerful 40 Committee—which monitored covert activities for the White House—that he, too, felt that Azorian should probably be canceled.
Rush and Helms went back and forth—the former pointing out reasons not to go forward, with the latter countering, almost always with the same underlying message: The target was just as valuable as it had been the day the whole thing was initiated, when all of the defense and intelligence hierarchy agreed. Helms also warned that to cancel the operation at this juncture, after so much of the work had been completed, would be viewed by contractors as capricious and might jeopardize relationships with these companies like Lockheed and Honeywell, which had already contributed enormously to intelligence gathering and national security. The subtext, essentially, was: Do you really want to infuriate Kelly Johnson?
Rush listened and decided to place the program’s fate in the hands of a review committee that would take the fall to study cost data, projected savings if the program were canceled, and technical risks that might still arise if it went forward.
On December 11, the panel reported back and was surprisingly positive about the work that had been done to date. In particular, the panel was in awe of the engineering work, including “developments on the boundary of state-of-the-art”—such as some of the largest forgings ever made and entirely new pipe metallurgy—but raised a warning at the same time. The members were wary of a reliance on such unproven technology, including a heavy-lift system that could not be tested until the actual mission was under way, and were concerned about the costs. The overall budget had grown 66 percent since the first estimates in October 1970 and was likely to continue climbing.
The message was mostly positive but also mixed. Parangosky had no idea what to think.
At last, after six furious months of debate and what seemed to be increasing certainty that Azorian would be killed, Henry Kissinger delivered a memo to the 40 Committee stating that President Nixon “was impressed by the project’s creative and innovative approach to a complicated task” and wanted to praise the cooperation among various elements of the intelligence and defense communities in the cause of national security.
In other words: Nixon had given the program a green light.
Nearly four years after the first meetings about the lost Soviet sub—and two months after the keel was laid in Chester—Project Azorian had the president’s official support.
33
Graham’s Masterpiece
APRIL 1973
By the time 1973 rolled around, John Graham’s masterpiece had taken shape in Chester. The Glomar Explorer’s diesel-electric-powered engines were installed and running, and it was no longer necessary for the ship to be connected to shore power.
Every step of the assembly had been chewed over and preplanned, but it was all more difficult than anyone anticipat
ed, and nearly every one of those steps had some kind of complication. The shipyard had run out of ways to add men and shave time. Ultimately, Parangosky was forced to clear a second Sun Ship vice president, the yard’s production manager, to convince workers to stay on the job.
It worked. Over the next two months, the plumbing, wiring, and lift-system control equipment were all installed, and the massive docking legs were lowered into their tilting cradles over the deck. The moon-pool gates were installed on rails below the ship’s bottom and their hydraulic drive motors hooked up and tested. Everything was lining up, with just one minor delay. The main radio wasn’t working.
The maximum power allowable for a radio transmitter on a commercial ship in 1972 was one thousand kilowatts, but the Explorer was going to require far more power to handle the CIA’s needs, so engineers had quietly installed a ten-thousand-kilowatt transmitter, purchased from the Collins Radio Company, under the cover of darkness. When it failed, Crooke was forced to call in a Collins engineer to do the service, and when the man saw the unusually powerful transmitter, he looked stunned. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is a CIA operation,” he joked.
With the end in sight, John Graham set a target date of April 12 for the initial builder’s sea trials, which would test the ship’s basic systems—to make sure it all actually worked.
• • •
The Hughes Glomar Explorer left the Sun shipyard for the first time on exactly the date that John Graham had circled: April 12, 1973. The ship sailed down the Delaware River, under the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and through Delaware Bay into the Atlantic Ocean for the builder’s trials. Things went well. The tests were smooth. And an assessment stated that “overall seaworthiness, mobility and response is excellent.”
