The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

After more than four years of preparation, and twenty-six days of struggles and stresses at the target site, the claw was in position over the submarine it had been designed to grab. The sub appeared to be lying exactly as the site survey from the Glomar II had predicted. But Hank Van Calcar wanted to test that accuracy. He directed the captain to move the ship to one end of the target and then to move in very small increments of just a few feet at a time, so that he could map the target with the high-resolution sonar. The measurements matched up precisely.

  Everyone in the room closed in around the screen as an operator moved the joystick to position the crosshairs over various parts of the sub. He panned over the sail and along the top of the sub’s deck to a mark that they’d all seen in the photos and planned to use as a point of reference for aligning the CV. But as he closed in on it, there was something else there, something in a familiar shape. It was a ball-peen hammer. No one in the room could recall a hammer from any of the photos. Erwin Runge, one of the original CIA task force engineers, ran out to get “the book,” which contained all the images from Halibut and Glomar II. The hammer wasn’t in any of them. Turns out it had been dropped by a diver working in the well and had fallen 16,500 feet down through the sea, landing right on top of the target.

  Once word got around that the submarine was in the CV’s camera sights, seemingly everyone on the Explorer was agitating to come to the control van for a look. Nielsen agreed to let anyone who was interested file through, in small groups. After that, the control room would be off-limits. Clementine may have reached her position over the top of the sub, but the work left to do was some of the most precise and difficult of the entire mission. The concentration and tension required by the controllers would be too great to risk any distractions, yet Nielsen was also bothered by the idea that he had to deny these men, who had all contributed so much to get to this point, the chance to watch the thing they’d all been working toward for so long. So he asked that TV monitors showing the same feed from the control room be placed in a few locations throughout the ship. “And these were intently watched by sailors, cooks, divers, drill crew—all hands—during the crucial moments of the recovery,” a CIA summary later reported.

  With Clementine parked over the wreck, operators panned and tilted her tripod-mounted cameras to film the sub, looking for anything unusual that they might want to be aware of—changes in the sub’s orientation, previously unnoticed hull damage, or potentially hazardous seafloor features that could snag the claw. The site was coursing with sea life. Strange, almost extraterrestrial-seeming crabs plodded around on the seabed, and huge, bizarre, blind fish swam into and out of the camera’s view. The sub itself looked exactly as it had in the thousands of pictures taken with Joe Houston’s “catfish solution” cameras on the Glomar II.

  • • •

  With more than sixteen thousand feet of pipe deployed, plus Clementine on the end, the heavy-lift system had an astounding 12 million pounds hanging from the derrick. This was more than twice the weight that had been carried during the sea trials, and the stress on the ship was obvious. It creaked and groaned, and the strain on the well walls was so intense that crewmen witnessed them bending in and out—a terrifying sight that Charlie Canby assured everyone was normal; all steel structures are designed to give under stress.

  The Soviet tug had chosen this inopportune moment to get even more reckless. It again passed within feet of the Explorer and began circling the ship, and this time several sailors were spotted taking height and distance measurements of the Explorer’s superstructure using a sextant and an alidade. The Explorer was as vulnerable at this point as it would be. The ship needed to maintain its station now or risk stressing the pipe, as the controllers positioned Clementine perfectly over the wreck to make the grab.

  Clementine’s operators had been practicing for the past month on Hank Van Calcar’s simulator when they sat down to begin the procedure. For the first time, they began to fire the capture vehicle’s eight hydraulic thrusters, which allowed them to position it with accuracy of less than a foot. Clementine had been outfitted with profiling sonars as a backup, with the expectation that the thrusters would stir up great clouds of silt, which would blind the cameras and render them useless. But oddly, the thrusters created only bubbles. The bottom was much firmer than anyone had expected.

  Around nine A.M., as the SB-10 made one of its closest and most harrowing passes yet, coming within fifty yards of the Explorer’s bow, Clementine’s controllers lowered the aft breakout legs to the seafloor and then tipped the capture vehicle’s bridle so that the front legs touched down at the other end of the wreck. With the huge legs on firm ground, controllers were free to lower Clementine onto the target, using the towing eye on the K-129’s bow and a crack at the aft end as reference points for an alignment they’d practiced over and over on the simulator.

  They opened the claw as much as possible, spreading the finger-like davits wide, and then lowered the unit until it, too, contacted the floor, unloading 1 million pounds of weight from the string. The controllers had expected the floor to be soft and silty, so that the davits would actually sink into the mud under the sub, but this ground was firm, almost rocklike. It resisted, and an additional 2 million pounds were off-loaded from the heavy-lift system in an attempt to drive the tines into the ground under the sub.

  One of the control engineers argued that the best way to ensure a full grab was to clamp the sub tightly, but Van Calcar, Dave Sharp, and the rest of the controllers disagreed. They were afraid of damaging the sub’s pressure hull and instead directed the controller to slide around and under the sub lightly, which jolted it and caused the wreck to slip and tip over a bit farther.

  Off-loading weight from the heavy-lift system had only minimal effect, but there was little more that could be done. The controllers had to hope that the tines had penetrated enough so that when the lift began, they would curl around and under the hull. Once they’d gone as deep as they were going to go, operators lifted upward until the tines were physically touching the sub.

  They were ready to attempt the breakout. Pulling the submarine off the floor, out of the bed, would be done in two ways. The bulk of the force would come from the breakout legs, which had pistons that would push out into the seafloor when a flow of seawater was sent down the pipe hydraulically. This extended the length of each leg and would, in theory, break the sub out of whatever it was resting in. At the same time, the heavy-lift system would begin to pull up until the sub was hanging on the pipe, but with the vehicle’s bridle still attached to the legs. It wasn’t a violent process. The lift out was slow, to minimize stress on the system. The analogy that John Owen, who’d studied geology, used was of a stick stuck in the mud. You don’t grab it in the middle and pull straight up, because that’s the point of maximum load. Rather, you grab an end and peel.

  And it all worked—the pistons pushed and the pipe pulled and the claw grabbed the sub and lifted it out of the soil. Around the ship, on the rig floor, inside the heavy-lift control room, and even in the crew quarters, men felt and heard the strain on the system, and as the enormous metal wreck popped out of the seabed, cheers rang out in the control van. All that remained now was to pull 16,500 feet of pipe attached to millions of pounds of submarine back to the surface without any major malfunctions. But just as the operators were about to initiate the lift, Western Gear’s engineers noticed yet another breakdown in the heave-compensation system, a broken pump that was going to take at least a few hours to fix. This meant that the claw would have to hang there, with the immense weight of the sub on its most fragile components, the davits, for however long it took to fix the pump.

  While engineers scrambled to fix the heave compensators, the captain kept the ship as still as possible while maintaining a close watch on the SB-10, which was still acting erratically, for no ostensible reason. Gresham tried flags, lights, and a radio call to tell the ship to back off, informing the Soviets that
the Explorer was “maneuvering with difficulty,” a message that was either not heard or flatly ignored.

  During the lull, roughnecks fussed with the pipe system, removing some doubles and reconnecting the seawater hydraulic line, allowing controllers to push a little harder on the pistons. This provided some additional lift, easing the strain on the davits, but it also caused a shift in the position of the target itself. A wave of energy shot up the pipe into the ship, violently enough that many on board felt it. All eyes turned to the camera operators, who scanned the target and noticed that the sail portion of the submarine had dropped and turned, as if the davits holding it had let the load slip slightly. What that meant, however, wouldn’t be known until the lift commenced.

  Twenty hours after the first attempted breakout, the procedure was repeated, and this time controllers pumped seawater down the pipe and into each of the breakout legs, to activate the release function. Four pins, one in each leg, popped out, disconnecting the legs from the CV, leaving Clementine alone, with the sub inside her claw, at the end of the pipe string. The legs would be left behind on the floor, their usefulness exhausted, and the lift could finally begin.

  When the Explorer arrived at the target site on July 4, the mission director’s expectation was that the operation would be completed in six or seven days. Now, thirty days after arrival, they were only beginning the lift, a process that was going to take at least another two days. The heavy-lift system could move only so fast and was operating at its outer limits, with 14 million pounds of metal hanging under the ship. Fortunately, the sea was mostly cooperative, and every chunk of ground covered on the way up was a relief on the system, as each of the 274 doubles that came off the string removed fifteen tons of stress. During that first day, three thousand feet of pipe was recovered.

  Nielsen felt comfortable enough in the lift progress to leave the control van and begin preparations for the ship’s next move, out of the target area and into a friendly harbor. The Explorer went to sea with two possible destinations—Midway Island and Lahaina, Hawaii. The latter was a civilian port, and not a concern. But Midway was a Navy base, and to use it would require a cover story. Nielsen sent a message out over open channels that the ship’s “nodule collector vehicle” had suffered damage after colliding with a silt-covered basalt outcrop and that he was requesting permission from the US Navy to proceed to Midway for repairs.

  The plan from there was to have this fake mining-machine injury diagnosed as inoperable in Midway, at which point the ship would be sent back to the US mainland, where the necessary parts were located. In reality, CIA officers would remove the most sensitive documents recovered from the ship in Midway—ideally, missiles and code books—and secret them out under cover of darkness. Then the ship could continue the less urgent exploitation at sea, while en route to the United States for those fake repairs.

  56

  Tysons, We Have a Problem

  AUGUST 4, 1974

  For those men on the heavy-lift and pipe-handling crews, the slow process of raising Clementine and her target back to the surface was anything but boring. Every moment was tense as the system strained under the load, requiring constant attention and repairs. And then there was life inside the heavy-lift control room, where Fred Newton worked.

  Newton was a nuclear physicist with a specialty in Soviet weapons and top-level clearance, which was why he was first recruited into Azorian, but he was also an electrical engineer, and during the construction phase, Newton contributed to the Explorer’s design.

  On the ship, he was one of four men assigned to the heavy-lift controls. This was a critical job, considering the unprecedented loads that were being handled, and the four individuals worked in two-man, twelve-hour shifts inside a small, windowless room inside the portside wing wall, at the waterline. Newton had tremendous admiration for John Graham even though they’d barely interacted. In fact, he joked, Graham probably despised electrical engineers and nuclear physicists because he saw their sensors as fussy ornaments on his mechanical hardware.

  When the heavy-lift system was in operation, it was in the hands of just two controllers, and no one else was allowed to be in that section of the ship. Each tandem included one engineer from Global Marine and one from Western Gear, since the two companies shared responsibility for the heavy-lift and heave-compensation systems.

  Newton had been in charge of installing the system’s strain gauges, which measured the stresses being imparted during the lift and were monitored from the heavy-lift room, and Graham had helped him position them. As an intuitive engineer, Graham could just eyeball it all and know where the stresses would be highest, as well as what might cause them. If he could have been there, as the claw and sub rose through the water, approaching a mile above the floor, he would have hated the sight. Newton and his shift-mate, Tom Fry, were at a near panic for hours on end, screaming into the sound-powered headsets whenever a decision was required. The system was run by racks filled with eleven hundred CMOS logic cards and thirty-six switches on a board. Depending on the situation, Newton—or his Global counterpart, John Owen—needed to hit a certain one at a certain time, and the way it felt—for pretty much every minute he was in that chair—was that picking the wrong switch could sink the ship.

  What made the system stressful, Owen thought, was the automation. The operator of an automated system is the emergency switch. He must sit there, vigilant, waiting for a problem and ready to jump in and take over. That’s tedious when automation works well, but on the heavy-lift and heave-compensation systems, tested to their full capacities for the first time during the actual lift of the sub, it was nerve-fraying work in an environment that didn’t exactly set a man at ease in the first place.

  As the sub rose, one-inch-diameter steel bolts began to strain and hiss and eventually pop loose, firing across the deck like bullets. This wasn’t necessarily a problem; in fact, it was expected. As the load settled, the pressure equalized and certain points released stress by finding weak spots. But those steel bullets could also kill a man. Owen cracked later that when he was up on the rig floor working on a heave-compensator control issue, the constant whiz and ping of the rivets reminded him of the sound effects from an old Hopalong Cassidy Western, when cowboy bullets were regularly ricocheting off boulders.

  The first rivets startled Newton, but he quickly got used to them, distracted by scarier signs of straining, such as in corners and at the intersections of beams, where he hadn’t put any strain gauges. What he realized, when the world’s burliest lift system was finally in operation, was that there weren’t enough strain gauges in the world to properly monitor the stresses being put on the pipe, tower, and ship. He was, he realized, an overly confident man in his twenties, alone on the frontier of something that had never been done before—something he might well not survive. Up in the pump room, probably the single most dangerous place on the ship, no one had ever seen pressures like the ones being experienced during the lift, as pump units handling three thousand pounds per square inch sprang leaks, causing streams of seawater to jet out with such force that they could cut off a man’s hand.

  • • •

  For others on the ship, however, the lift period was painfully slow, almost boring. John Parsons had been awake for more than a day by the time the lift was actually under way, and knowing that the process of raising the sub would take much longer than a night’s sleep, he went off to bed early in the morning of August 4, figuring he could get plenty of sleep and still be up in time to watch hours of pipe slowly ascending through the depths.

  He was in his bunk, sleeping, when a crewman burst into his room shortly after nine A.M. “Something’s wrong,” the man said. “We’ve lost a lot of weight.”

  Parsons threw on his coveralls and ran to mission control, where all of the key spies and engineers were staring nervously at a screen that showed no obvious problems. There were Clementine and the sub, moving very slowly up toward t
he surface. But that couldn’t be right.

  That’s what Sherm Wetmore thought, too. He’d been eating breakfast in the mess when he felt the ship shudder. It was like a little earthquake, and he recognized it immediately as an anomaly—either something had just run into the ship, or there was a problem with the pipe. Wetmore called the heavy-lift control cabin, where the operator on duty told him that they seemed to have lost some load. Whatever happened was sudden and violent, he said, because the heave compensator had stroked out, causing the pistons to shoot upward like a gigantic slingshot. Wetmore ran to the rig floor and saw crewmen rushing to bleed air out of the compensator so that it could equalize to whatever the new weight was on the pipe. They cranked open two large dump valves, one on each cylinder, and compressed air came screaming out, louder, Wetmore thought, than any jet engine he’d ever heard.

  By the time Wetmore got to the heavy-lift control room, it was clear to his operators that a significant amount of load had been lost, but when he called up to the control van, he got a very odd reply. The Lockheed controller who answered said that he was staring at a picture of Clementine and everything appeared to be fine.

  Hank Van Calcar, Ray Feldman, and the team in that control van were surprised by the frantic tone in Wetmore’s voice. They had felt no visceral change or shift. And the picture they were seeing looked fine.

  The spies, being bureaucrats, called a meeting, while the various technical teams scrambled to identify the problem. It didn’t take long. The CCTV wasn’t actually showing a live feed. To save bandwidth, the camera system had been designed so that the image updated only when there was a change in the picture, and Clementine’s cameras didn’t detect any change, so the feed had been showing an image of the claw from many hours before.

  Once that signal was reset, the problem was apparent, in black and white: Several of Clementine’s tines had broken during the ascent, and a chunk of the submarine, at least half and maybe more, had fallen back into the sea.