by Josh Dean
The State Department continued to worry that the submarine, as a “man of war,” was still the property of the USSR, even if the Soviets had no idea where it was. But intelligence is dirty business and rules are broken all the time. They’re relevant only if you get caught. If that were to happen here, the Soviets might exploit it for propaganda and political purposes—or they might choose to sit quietly and say nothing out of embarrassment that they lost a nuclear ballistic missile submarine. What was more, Ratliff reported, “As Hal Sonnenfeldt pointed out in the 1972 review, détente is not going to terminate mutual intelligence operations which the target country will consider obnoxious and the collecting country vital.” Given a similiar opportunity, the Soviets would probably do the same thing.
• • •
With the ship’s departure imminent, and—at least for the moment—all of the engineering challenges solved, there was little to do but sit and wait. The only people who actually had work left to do were the security officers, and they were still scrambling to prepare for all eventualities. Paul Evans’ staff worked up “the book,” a three-ring binder filled with loose-leaf pages organized into sections with tabs color-coded to the progressive severity of threats that the Explorer could encounter at sea. Whoever was on communication back at the program office would have this book close at hand and would consult it upon receipt of certain urgent coded messages—messages that would be immediately relayed to the East Coast via the Donald Duck phone.
Security officers also visited the wives of all the key government employees who would go out on the mission—the CIA engineers, nuclear analysts, and Navy men. The security teams provided only very limited briefings as to what their husbands were doing. They wanted to make it clear, however, that the mission wasn’t without risks, and also that secrecy was tantamount, so that attempts at communications should be limited to emergencies only. Each wife was given an officer as her point of contact.
Final preparations were increasingly nervy for everyone. As the CIA officers visited spouses, Cotton Collier told members of the roughneck crew that they’d each need to submit next-of-kin affidavits, to be filed away in case they were killed or taken prisoner.
In truth, no one directly associated with Azorian knew what would happen if the Soviets meddled. That extremely sensitive matter was above even Parangosky’s pay grade. When he briefed Colby about the meeting with the Navy in which Dietzen had scoffed at the CIA’s plans to respond to provocations with water cannons and shrugged shoulders, Colby expressed some sympathy with the Navy’s point. He asked how many Marines the ship could carry. None, Parangosky replied. There was no room for more personnel, and you can’t very well hide Marines, or their arms, in a ship that was supposed to be commercial.
Colby accepted that explanation, but then thought more about it and called Parangosky back to say that he still thought the Explorer should carry a platoon of Marines. Azorian’s chief explained—again, as calmly as possible—that this was a bad idea for the same reasons he’d stated before. It was a clear signal that the Explorer wasn’t a mining ship. But he agreed at least to tell the ship’s security team to reverse course and stow away some guns.
Not that this was simple, either. There was no time to use official channels to requisition guns from the Navy or the CIA, not without creating attention. If the ship’s security crew was going to bring guns, they’d have to go rogue and buy them from stores. Brent Savage, being a former cop, offered to take care of it. He and two other officers went out and bought eight guns—a collection of shotguns and rifles selected because even the firearms required a cover story. If the Explorer was ever to be boarded and the security team overrun, they’d need a way to explain the fact that a commercial ship was carrying arms. The rifles, they were told to say, had been brought aboard to shoot flying fish and birds from the deck, for fun, while the shotguns were for skeet shooting. To bolster that explanation, Savage bought a launcher and a large supply of clay pigeons and stashed the whole arsenal in a crate under Dave Sharp’s bunk.
46
Waiting, More Waiting
As final preparations were under way in Long Beach, CIA director William Colby began to lobby the national security establishment in Washington for a final, official green light. On May 23, he delivered a memo to Kissinger reasserting the target’s “unique intelligence value.” Colby did this not just as CIA director, but also as chairman of the US Intelligence Board, which had recently reviewed and updated the operation’s projected intelligence bounty.
Colby summarized the board’s identification of “five major categories of equipment which are believed to represent the more significant . . . intelligence targets,” listed in presumable order of importance:
Cryptographic machines and materials
Nuclear warheads and related documents, which “would provide important new insight into Soviet nuclear technology, weapon design concepts, and related operational procedures”
The SS-N-5 missile, which “although not in itself the major SLBM threat, would provide important information on technologies relevant to the SS-N-6, and possibly to some aspects of the SS-N-8”
Navigation and fire control systems, especially “equipment and documentation in the missile fire control category,” as well as “instruction books, internal circuit diagrams, spare parts, and related documentation” that could “add significantly to our technical understanding of the GOLF-II strategic weapon system”
Sonar and other naval equipment, though in this case the board acknowledged that most sonar and antisubmarine warfare equipment would probably be obsolete based on the kinds actually in use by the Soviet Navy in 1974
Two weeks later, on the afternoon of June 5, the 40 Committee met in the White House Situation Room to discuss Azorian. Parangosky, Duckett, and Colby all quickly reviewed the state of the operation, telling the committee that the Explorer was ready to go to sea in the small window of opportunity that was about to open. Kissinger led the meeting, and his primary concern was the potential for interference from Soviet ships in the target area. He wanted assurance that he would be alerted immediately if a ship arrived on the scene, and Duckett told the secretary of state that direct communication was possible—through encrypted channels and even in the open, as certain ship-to-shore messages would actually be embedded with code.
“What could go wrong?” Kissinger asked.
Colby and Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements answered this one simultaneously: “Lots of things.” Soviet ships could arrive and intervene. Best case, they would just harass the Explorer, causing delays and distractions. Worst case, they could send divers into the water after the recovery had begun and would see the claw rising through the water with the sub in its grasp. They could also decide to board the ship without provocation. And then there were operational risks—most prominent among them the possibility that the recovery itself would fail. It was, after all, one of the most mechanically complex operations ever mounted by the United States—and there was no real way to put the systems, working in unison, to the test until it was time to do it for real.
Clements wanted Kissinger and the rest of the president’s closest national security advisers to consider the project carefully. If it worked, Azorian would probably be a good thing for the United States. But a “flap,” as he called it, could be a disaster. And no matter how it turned out, Clements said, there was no chance the United States could keep it all secret for long.
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Colby replied. The director was confident in his operational security, in the cover story, and in his ability to continue to obfuscate, if necessary. “There are 1,800 people who know about this project and we could tell 1,700 of them that it failed and nothing was accomplished,” he said.
As the conversation continued, member support waxed and waned. The more they talked, the more Clements seemed to turn against the operation. He told the room that he had serious d
oubts about what the United States would gain from a six-year-old submarine and that Dr. Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist who led the creation of the hydrogen bomb and who had served as a key consultant to Azorian on the sub’s nuclear weapons, had expressed serious doubts, too. “And he’s been up to his eyeballs” in this project, Clements added.
Duckett dismissed the notion that Teller was involved “up to his eyeballs” and that the scientist was against the project. Teller was a consultant, and an important one, but he’d spent a relatively small amount of time actually working on Azorian. He also still supported the effort.
When Clement asked Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Albert Hall for his opinion on the value of what was sitting down there on the ocean floor, Hall seemed to be in favor of recovering it. He said that as much as Soviet weaponry might have changed since the K-129 sank, the Pentagon still had no idea how Soviet missile systems work, nor had they ever come into possession of an actual intact warhead. Reverse engineering the key components—guidance, telemetry, detonators—would be an enormous boon to US missile defense, and the country’s nuclear scientists had a long list of questions that could likely be answered. In particular, the level of uranium enrichment the Soviets were achieving, the isotopic composition of plutonium in their weapons, and especially the control and security features on Soviet missiles—command and control of nuclear weaponry being a problem all designers struggled with.
The biggest skeptic in the room was Joseph Sisco, undersecretary of state for political affairs. Sisco’s group would be the ones who had to deal with the fallout of any program exposure, and it would be coming at a particularly terrible time, with arms-reduction talks just beginning. Even if the operation worked, Sisco said, it was going to leak, and that would have real implications for any Cold War thaw.
“Keep in mind that we’ve been deep into this problem for four years without a leak,” Duckett replied.
Kissinger considered that possibility. Did anyone really know how the Soviets would react to a leak? “Won’t they say, ‘Boys will be boys’?” Kissinger asked. “Or will they say, ‘You dirty SOBs’?” His own opinion—informed by the Gary Powers U-2 episode—was that the Soviets wouldn’t say much, if anything. They were more likely to view the operation as an intelligence coup that their own military allowed to happen by losing track of the submarine in the first place. Any blowback would be internal.
Opinion in the room seemed to be shifting. When Kissinger asked what the US public reaction to the program’s exposure might be, Sisco thought it would be positive. The public was likely to be proud that its government could pull this off. On the other hand, if the project was canceled, and the news came out, the public would want to know why. Huge sums had been spent. What would the answer be?
“Morality,” Kissinger answered, and then admitted that this was a problem in itself: The same public would want to know why the United States spent four years and a large amount of money on something it knew from the outset was immoral.
Ultimately, Kissinger said, only one person was in a position to weigh the foreign and domestic political implications, the same person who was going to be asked why the United States was in the covert operations business with Howard Hughes, and why he was willing to risk a direct confrontation with the Soviets over a mission that was morally questionable: the president. And although the committee was ready to recommend going forward with Azorian, Kissinger needed Colby to prepare a memo for Nixon.
As the meeting was breaking up, Kissinger grabbed the CIA director to give him one more order: The ship was to hold off on any recovery effort until after July 3, when the president returned from Moscow.
• • •
The late 1960s was a period of runaway acceleration for ballistic missile stockpiles. Realizing they were outgunned, the Soviets began a massive buildup of ICBMs that motivated and alarmed the US leadership. In 1967, Lyndon Johnson told the public that the Soviets had also begun constructing an antiballistic missile (ABM) system around Moscow, which only increased concern at the Pentagon, where military planners understood that a substantial nuclear stockpile plus adequate antimissile defenses by either nation would give that side a decided advantage and that having an advantage was a dangerous position to be in. Peace hinged on détente. Continuing such rapid escalation, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara warned, was “an insane road to follow.”
So Johnson proposed the two nations begin Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), and in 1967 he and his Soviet counterpart, Premier Aleksey Kosygin, met at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, though official negotiations didn’t begin until Johnson was out of office. At the prodding of his successor, Richard Nixon, SALT began on November 17, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland, and continued for more than two years, as negotiators from the United States and the Soviet Union haggled over the number of ICBMs, the extent and status of ABM systems, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
Finally, on May 26, 1972, Nixon and Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev met in Moscow to sign an interim agreement that, for the first time ever, froze the total number of ballistic missiles at current levels and permitted each side to build only two ABM installations—one around the national capital and another at a single ICBM launch location.
Which wasn’t the end, of course. Nixon and Kissinger made détente their Cold War strategy and immediately sought to pursue additional limits on arms, focusing especially on a large ICBM loophole. The SALT I agreement limited only the number of ICBMs, but both countries had developed a missile that could carry multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs)—a single missile that, once in orbit, can deploy multiple nuclear warheads, each steered to a different target site. (The Soviets had developed versions that could carry anywhere from ten to thirty-eight MIRVs on a single missile.) You can imagine why this would be problematic, and the haggling picked up anew on a subsequent round of negotiations, known as SALT II.
This is the background in which Nixon and Kissinger pursued and approved the Azorian mission, which—pending presidential sign-off—would finally depart for the target site while Nixon was in Moscow negotiating arms reduction.
47
Trouble on Romaine Street
JUNE 1974
Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, June 5, Michael Davis was wrapping up his regular inspection of the perimeter of 7020 Romaine Street. The block-long two-story Summa Corp. office had once been a key outpost of the Hughes empire, but by 1974 it was little more than a storage facility for records and memorabilia. Davis was a father of six with thinning hair, caterpillar eyebrows, and a salt-and-pepper goatee that made him look significantly older than his thirty-nine years. He worked days selling Corvairs and Camaros at Crossroads Chevrolet in North Hollywood and nights working security for Summa, a quiet, easy job that offered ample opportunity to take naps and chip away at his sleep debt.
There were items of value inside Romaine Street, but its reputation as an impenetrable fortress filled with secret files—“the Bastille,” as Summa’s executive VP Nadine Henley once called it—was a vast inflation, especially by mid-1974. It was, as the Hughes PR rep Arelo Sederberg later wrote, “a neglected, lonely place—like a worn-out ship hulk moored at an abandoned pier.”
Davis was the only guard on duty. He carried no weapon and the electronic burglar alarm system wasn’t even working that night, when he unlocked a set of glass doors from the street and was immediately shoved inside and onto the lobby floor by two men whose faces he never saw.
“Be quiet and don’t look around,” one of them snapped as the other tied a blindfold around Davis’ face, duct-taped his mouth and hands, and yanked him back to his feet. The men shoved the guard forward, through a second set of doors to the building’s interior. Davis had walked those halls hundreds of times, often in the dark, so even though he could see nothing through the blindfold, he knew exactly where he was when the men sto
pped—inside the ground-floor office of Kay Glenn, a key aide to Hughes’s most trusted lieutenant, Bill Gay, and an administrator of Hughes Aircraft.
The men hadn’t asked Davis to direct them to any particular place, and yet they clearly knew how to find Glenn’s office, where they ordered Davis to sit. He could tell by the clanking of tools on metal that they were working on a filing cabinet—one, it turns out, that contained a small safe—but he also heard a different, duller clanking sound, as well as the sounds of two more men, whose voices got louder as they approached and stopped across the hall, where the entrance to a large walk-in Mosler vault was located.
There was a hiss, then a pop, as the second pair of intruders began to cut away at the lock of the vault door using an acetylene torch.
Once the two men who’d grabbed Davis were finished in Glenn’s office, they led him upstairs, to payroll, then into the office of Lee Murrain, another Summa executive. From there, the burglars went to Henley’s office and finally into a large second-floor conference room where stacks of sensitive Hughes files were being sorted and compiled in preparation for the 17-million-dollar slander lawsuit filed against Hughes by his former confidant Robert Maheu. Davis heard the men sifting through papers and conferring on their relative importance.
“These look good!” one exclaimed.
“Let’s take those,” the other replied.
The burglars seemed to be in no hurry, and over the course of four hours of casual plundering they made stops in nearly every important room of the building before finally taking Davis to the basement, into a large room that served as a warehouse for excess supplies and furniture. Rolls of carpet lay on the floor and Davis tripped several times before he was finally shoved onto a couch. The thieves taped his legs and told him to “stay put.” By this time, his blindfold was only half-on, but it was too dark to see much of anything and one of the burglars pulled it down around his neck, seemingly as a courtesy, as they rushed out.
