by Josh Dean
As soon as Schoenbaum heard the explanation, he stopped Pendleton. “No, you’re not going to work on that,” he said. “Come with me.” He led Pendleton to White’s office and asked if he had actually authorized this work, as described. “Is this really what he’s doing?”
“Yep,” White replied. “That’s what he’s doing.”
“Well, he isn’t going to be doing it anymore,” Schoenbaum said. “We’ve got that covered. We don’t want anybody else involved. So, forget it. Don’t even think about it.”
“Shit,” White told Pendleton, once Schoenbaum was gone. “We lost a job there.”
As an alternative, they were asked to help with other things. And Pendleton got a tedious assignment that felt a little like a punishment. Brent Savage came to his desk with reels of video footage taken mostly at the pier in Long Beach, but also some from Chester and Redwood City. They needed someone to go through every frame in more than forty thousand feet of film and “cut out anybody who couldn’t be seen”—anyone who might be sight sensitive—using a hand slicer. “You know all these guys, so you’re the natural person to do this,” Savage said, and patted him on the back. It took Pendleton weeks to finish the job.
• • •
Dave Pasho, who’d been hired specifically to provide science in support of the cover story, had literally nothing of immediate relevance to the mission to do. He had taken the opportunity to work on actual mining concepts, in the hopes that Global Marine might decide to pursue this business for real later, when the security guys assigned him a job, too. Being young and single with no family to go home to, Pasho volunteered to be the night-duty officer, responsible for all communications from the ship after normal working hours. Pasho would sleep through lunch, then come into the office around six P.M., as everyone was leaving for the day, to sit by the radio and await telex messages that arrived via the communications officer inside the small, secure “box” that held the sensitive communications gear.
Once the mission was under way, the secret Harvey door was left open after dark so that Pasho had access to the box. Security officers briefed him on how to interpret messages passed from the communications officer and showed him what they called “the book,” the three-ring binder filled with bad scenarios that might occur on the Explorer, as well as precise instructions on how to react.
“The book” was like an instruction manual for crises of varying severity, from some kind of industrial accident to a military encounter that could spark the third world war. Pasho was to sit and wait and hope that nothing of concern happened. If it did, though, he’d have to react quickly. If a message came through the radio officer that said, “Soviet ship moving to harassment pose. Divers going into water,” Pasho would flip to the section of “the book” devoted to this scenario and react accordingly. In most cases, he was to call for immediate help from security. If the situation was truly dire—for instance, if a message said, “We are being boarded”—he would have no time to recruit help. In that case, he was to pick up the Donald Duck phone in the CIA’s communication box and get word to the highest levels of government. “At that point,” Pasho later observed, “I’m on the phone with Henry Kissinger.”
Pasho and the engineers were also supposed to be available to listen for and help solve any technical problems that might arise. Log reports from the ship arrived often, with every new development. They were printed out on computer pages and tacked up in a long hallway so that anyone who came in, or was curious, could view the operational details in sequence—or go straight to a particular moment.
• • •
The office also kept tabs on John Graham’s health. The Explorer’s chief architect had officially left the program, but he remained a kind of guardian angel, as well as a giant brain on reserve should some engineering crisis arise during the recovery. His condition, however, kept deteriorating.
On July 19, Nell Graham drove her husband to Hoag Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles and had him admitted, but not without unusual security precautions. Doctors were searched and then observed anytime they came to treat Graham, and under no circumstances was his room to be unobserved. The Agency’s paranoid fear was that Graham would be put under anesthesia or would become delirious—in either case, making him a risk for accidentally exposing program secrets. A security man, ostensibly working for Howard Hughes, was stationed outside the room at all times and would come in whenever a nurse, doctor, or visitor entered, unless that visitor was Nell, who made it clear that the mysterious guards were unwelcome in her presence.
Those who were closest to Graham, including his top architects, filed in over the final week of his life. He was barely alert the last time Chuck Cannon went to see him, but even near death, with his wife and loyal secretary, Laura, both at his bedside, Graham was thinking about the Explorer. “You gotta go make sure that those damn Enterprise diesels on the ship are doing alright,” he told Cannon. The ship didn’t actually have Enterprise diesels. It had Nordberg engines. Graham was delirious, but only in the specifics. What he was worrying about there, in his dying days, was the ship.
54
The Breaking Point
More than a month after leaving Long Beach, Clementine was back in the water, with her bridle on, attached to the pipe string. The crew was ready to begin the undocking at last. Just after midnight on July 21, the procedure began. The weather was calm and the sea as flat as it had been in days, but a pesky four-foot swell was rocking the ship from side to side. The Explorer’s ocean scientists, who were monitoring the wave-rider buoys, conferred with mission control and determined when the swells were farthest apart, so that the undocking could begin.
Conditions weren’t ideal, but with a month gone and more severe weather on the way, this was as good as it was going to get. It was clear to everyone on board by this point that there was never going to be a perfect moment.
The first two sections of pipe to go down weren’t attached correctly and had to be raised back above the waterline so that the fittings could be checked. That was an easy fix, and the process was just beginning again when a new signal appeared on the radar.
The blip showed up at around seven A.M., several miles out. Time was too valuable now to stop operations when they were going well, even with a suspicious ship approaching, so Nielsen ordered the pipe handlers to continue.
The process of retrieving, moving, and attaching pipe was a sight to behold, a complicated ballet of automated equipment working in coordination with skillful humans. Each sixty-foot double was pulled out of storage by a crane and put on conveyors that carried it to the top of the derrick, where another crane grabbed it and dangled it over the top of the attached pipe sections. There, a giant wrench applied two and a half turns to reach maximum torque. Down below, in the water, divers worked in shifts inside a cage, tying the two electromechanical cables to the pipe by hand, after several efforts to automate the process failed in Long Beach.
At virtually any moment, some piece of equipment was under repair, and nearly every engineer on the ship was working twenty-four-hour shifts by this point just to keep the schedule from falling further behind. Meanwhile, an inspection team led by Harry Jackson roamed the ship in search of larger structural issues—the kinds of things that could wreck the mission, or even worse, sink the ship—and when Jackson spotted something, resident architect Charlie Canby and the captain would be informed.
On the positive side, the mystery ship got within two miles but changed direction and grew more distant, then dropped off radar altogether. It seemed to be gone, until a man on lookout called out at eleven fifteen P.M. that he spotted the lights of a vessel—no more than two miles away.
Still, operations continued. Clementine, by now, was more than three thousand feet down, so there was little risk of a visiting ship seeing anything suspicious. Even if a ship were to send divers into the water, all they’d see was a heavy pipe string vanishing into the abyss
—looking exactly like the tether of a mining vehicle on its way down to scoop up manganese nodules.
Which was good, because the approaching ship was no longer being coy. At midmorning, it set a course directly for the target site and just before eleven A.M. got within a few hundred feet of the Explorer’s starboard side, at which point it pivoted and began to circle.
This was a tiny ship relative to the Explorer—a 155-foot tug identified by the eyes and ears in the sky as the SB-10, an allegedly civilian salvage vessel of a type widely used by the Soviets as undercover intelligence ships. Often, these tugs accompanied submarines on patrol and carried divers.
Communication between the Explorer and the mainland was limited, and there was no way to safely connect the ship to Naval Intelligence in the Pacific, meaning that, save for the occasional encrypted cable from headquarters, the Explorer’s command was in the dark about the history and movement of Soviet vessels. What they didn’t know was that the Navy was paying close attention. Bobby Ray Inman, a rear admiral and a rising star in naval intelligence, had been dispatched to Hawaii to oversee a small surveillance group that watched for any sign that the ship’s true purpose had been detected. Inman had analysts inspecting radar and satellite feeds, linked in to the NSA’s communications intercepts, but mostly what they did was observe the open movement of merchant marine vessels that could be Soviet Navy ships in disguise.
They’d seen the SB-10 coming and were fairly certain its arrival was just coincidence. Which didn’t make the situation any less tense in Langley, in Hawaii, and especially on board the Explorer.
The SB-10 was close, so close that anyone on the Explorer could see an unknown number of crew in “fatigue-type outfits,” as well as shorts and, in some cases, swimsuits. There was at least one woman on the tug, too—the first female anyone had seen in a month, woo-hoo—and several sailors emerged from the tug and took photos, making no effort to hide what they were doing.
Having observed the Explorer from all sides, the SB-10 backed off and sailed three miles out, where it took a position off the ship’s stern, which seemed perplexing until someone noticed the current. It flowed that way, so that when anything was thrown overboard from the Explorer, it naturally carried in that direction. The Soviets were stealing the trash.
Ships outside of coastal boundaries disposed of their garbage by throwing it into the sea in plastic bags that eventually ripped, filled with water, and sank. The CIA was aware of this in advance, and nothing classified or even remotely sensitive went overboard. Those documents were shredded. So mostly what the Soviets were finding was useless junk. The trash had no intelligence value. But it was useful as a prank. The next day the trash went out with every item, including a few well-thumbed Playboys as a special gift, covered in a thick slime of Aqua Lube, a green grease used for lubricating pipe joints that is designed for use in deep-ocean environments. It is detergent- and solvent-resistant and is famous for its ability to ruin clothes and stay on skin for days, even after vigorous washing.
To make sure the Soviets didn’t miss a single bag of slimy mail, the crew began to pump acetylene gas into the bags. This made them extra-buoyant, so much so that they’d skip across the waves when thrown overboard, often causing the SB-10 to change course and chase them.
Still, the mere presence of this second Soviet ship further stressed nerves that were already fraying, even if much of the crew was too frantic to actually worry much. Within hours of the SB-10’s close pass, the heave-compensator cylinders sprang a serious leak that caused the immediate suspension of activity, as Western Gear’s crew ran to suss out and solve the problem. This was potentially quite serious. The heave compensators were critical to keeping the platform isolated from the ship’s up-and-down motion, allowing Clementine to stay in position relative to the sea bottom rather than following the motion of the ship in the swells. If the platform were to lose its stability, the pipe could bend, and that was something it wasn’t designed to do. Too much tension, and it would snap—causing some portion to spring back up toward the surface violently, perhaps with enough force to sink the ship.
At the advice of Captain Gresham, Dale Nielsen ordered all nonessential personnel to evacuate the moon-pool and well-wall sections until the leak could be fixed, which it was in remarkably short order.
• • •
By Thursday morning, more than ten thousand feet of pipe had been laid, meaning that two-thirds of the trip was finished. The Soviet tug, however, was increasingly an issue. The SB-10 had assumed an erratic schedule of basic harassment, sailing in close to the Explorer and then veering away, or pulling within one hundred feet and holding course, so close that any sudden movements by either ship could cause a collision. However, the crewmen who weren’t on duty grew less worried and more entertained by the tug, which looked tiny in comparison to their floating behemoth.
Poirier and his security team were less amused. The tug was too small to pose much of a takeover risk, but the SB-10’s captain was being unnecessarily risky with the tug’s maneuvers—behavior that seemed to grow bolder by the day. Fog made the tug’s erratic actions even more troubling. John Owen was in and out of the radio room helping the NSA techs with electronic problems, and he happened to be there when a fogbank circling the Explorer caused the tug to vanish completely from view. The radar operator could see it, though, and announced with some concern in his voice that the boat had turned again and was approaching the Explorer at high speed, as if to ram the side. Everyone stopped to stare at the console as the tug raced forward and then, just as it broke through the fog ring, slowed and cut its engines.
What most of the Explorer crew didn’t know was that satellites were intercepting every message the tug sent and bouncing those messages directly to Washington, where NSA analysts listened and then passed word to the CIA that there was nothing serious to worry about. At least for now, the Soviets didn’t seem to doubt that the Explorer was an ocean miner. In fact, the satellites had known this from the outset, when the SB-10 arrived and radioed home that it had encountered a strange ship. What is it doing? the captain asked. The answer, straight from fleet headquarters, was that this was an ocean miner, and we’ve been aware of it for years.
And yet, the SB-10 was a constant pest. It would appear, come close, then sail off and hang out a few miles away, before returning to a closer position. “The SB-10 made several dangerous passes,” the ship’s log noted on July 30. “Some dangerously close, apparently in disregard of common sense and good judgment!”
There seemed to be no schedule or rationale to the tug’s actions, and often the approaches came after dark, in which case the captain would order the ship’s high-intensity spotlight to illuminate the Soviet ship as long as it was operating in close quarters. The tug was annoying more than troubling, and as yet another tropical storm, Kim, churned up the ocean, some of the Explorer’s crew actually started to feel sorry for those Soviet sailors, sardined into a stuffy diesel tug bobbing around in giant swells.
Around the ship, a popular topic of conversation became what would happen if the Soviets stepped up their tactics. What if they boarded with weapons? No one really had a good answer. Very few people knew of the guns that the security staff had stashed under Dave Sharp’s bunk. They had been told not to worry, but that didn’t stop a series of rumors from spreading around, including one that the Navy had a submarine shadowing a safe distance away, and another that the ship had been wired with explosives that could, in a true emergency—if the Soviets were to board while the submarine was in the moon pool—be triggered, sinking the ship and crew.
Not even the mission command knew the true answer. They were aware that a special Naval Intelligence detachment under the command of Bobby Inman was in Hawaii monitoring ship traffic and could, in theory, order fighters to head for the target zone. Back at NURO, the leadership had discussed this eventuality many times. And even Dave Potter and Zeke Zellmer weren’t sure what the
worst-case-scenario plan should be. The US reaction would ultimately depend on circumstances. The first step would be to advise a Soviet vessel to stand down and not board. If that was ignored, the ship would issue an open distress signal to Naval Command that the mining ship Hughes Glomar Explorer was being boarded by men with guns from a vessel claiming to be a Soviet ship.
The trouble with sending a submarine, if one was in fact nearby, was that it would escalate the situation in a dangerous, even perilous, way. As NURO’s founding staff director Bob Frosch later explained, “Once that submarine surfaces, that’s when the guessing starts. Because they don’t know what we’re prepared to do, and we don’t know what they’re prepared to do.”
55
Touchdown!
As Clementine approached the bottom, the control center was abuzz. The mission director and his key engineering leads had gathered there to watch the display from the capture vehicle’s forward and side-scanning sonars, which probed in the darkness below for signs of the target. The display was simple—a series of yellow dots marching across the screen, over and over. “Then, on one pass, an irregular hemispheric hump displaced the flat line on the screen,” one of those officers later observed. “It was the submarine hulk for sure. Word spread rapidly throughout the ship. We were on target.”
From there, Clementine got close enough to the target for her CCTV cameras to begin sending back pictures—surprisingly clear images of what could only be a wrecked submarine appeared in the lens, which had crosshairs in the middle.
