The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  “This service is being conducted to honor Viktor Lokhof, Vladimir Kostyushko, Valentin Nosachev, and three other unidentified Soviet submariners who perished in March of 1968 in North Pacific Ocean when their ship suffered a casualty of unknown origin,” Nielsen said. “In a very real way this ceremony has resulted from the continuing tensions between our two nations. . . . Their casualty happened at a time when they were engaged in activities they deemed to be in service of their national protection. Their bodies have come into our possession some six years later through activities on behalf of our country which we feel fit the same criteria. The fact that our nations have had disagreements does not lessen in any way our respect for them and the service they have rendered. And so, as we return their mortal remains to the deep, we do so in a way that we hope would have had meaning to them, enclosed with a representative portion of the ship on which they served, and perished. As long as men and nations are suspicious of each other, instruments of war will be constructed, and brave men will die as these men have died, in the service of their country. Today we honor these six men, their shipmates, and all men who give their lives in patriotic service.”

  On the deck, the entire crew stood stoic, silent, as both the US and USSR flags fluttered.

  Nielsen continued. “May the day quickly come when men will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations. Neither shall there be war anymore.”

  A second voice took over the microphone and spoke, in a slightly less somber voice: “We know neither the exact burial ceremony of the Soviet Navy, nor the specific desires of what form a service these men might have desired. Accordingly, we have constructed a ceremony that we believe to be the closest approaching of an actual Soviet ceremony. Our intent is to preserve the meaning and symbolism of such a solemn occasion. In addition, the US Navy service for men at sea will follow.”

  There was a brief prayer, read from a copy of Prayers at Sea, by US Naval Institute chaplain Joseph F. Parker, and then the service continued, with each portion read in English first, followed by Russian.

  “The officers and men of this ill-fated USSR submarine, pendant number 722, whom we honor here today have reached their journey’s end. To you we entrust them that they find peace and contentment in their repose.

  “We therefore commit these crew members of this ship to a proper resting place to join the Valhalla of sea heroes who have gone before them.”

  “At this time, please close the doors to the vault,” Nielsen said as the Explorer’s deck crane pulled upward on one rose-red door, and then another. “Commence the hoist.”

  A member of the honor guard stepped in to bolt the vault door shut, and the crane hoisted the box up and over the side, depositing it as gently as a crane can, into the water, as the committal and benediction were read, and the “US Navy Hymn” played solemnly.

  The Explorer was running south, slowly, and the sky off the starboard side changed from orange to red as the sun sank farther below the horizon.

  At precisely 7:21 P.M., “during the final light of evening twilight,” the vault broke the surface, filled with water, and sank under the ocean, as white foam crested and bubbled where it had just been. “Everyone on board,” John Rutten later recalled, “was deep in thought and somber as the vault was let go into the open ocean.”

  “This concludes the ceremony,” Nielsen said.

  61

  Good-bye, Azorian; Hello, Matador

  HAWAII TO LONG BEACH, SEPTEMBER 1974

  The funeral at sea was the last major task for the Explorer’s crew. The exploitation work was completed, with the most valuable assets already packed up and flown back to wherever the Navy and CIA specialists would begin to mine the intelligence, most likely at Area 51, where the dry desert air was ideal for preservation of items recovered from the sea.

  Picketing by the marine workers’ union had resumed on the docks in Long Beach, forcing the captain to slow the Explorer’s approach to the mainland about halfway between Hawaii and California, to delay the scheduled arrival time of early morning on Thursday, September 19. Instead, the ship would enter port after midnight on a Saturday so that the Agency’s team on the dock could unload the vans from the ship under the cover of darkness, on a weekend, and get them onto flatbeds and out of town before the protests regained strength with the daylight.

  As Friday wound down, the Explorer approached its home harbor at last, more than ninety days since leaving port to begin the mission. For the final few hours it had been navigating on radar alone, as a thick fog blanketed the coast, making visual navigation extremely difficult.

  Just after midnight, a pilot boat emerged from the fog and led the mining vessel through the narrow channel into Long Beach port, where a pair of tugs grabbed the ship and turned it around, so that it could be tied up on the starboard side, the bow facing out toward the ocean.

  As the deckhands began the process of securing the enormous vessel to the pier, a dockside crew fired up a crane and began unloading vans, so that by the time the gangway had been dropped, the first set of trucks was already headed for the Nevada desert. These trucks had no special markings to indicate their origins. Only someone who’d worked in the black world would know that NoSoCalCo—the company name printed on the side—stood for North South California Company, the in-house transportation service for Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

  Parangosky was waiting at Pier E to greet the returning B crew, as was Doug Cummings, whose condition had stabilized. John Rutten was thrilled to see his patient there on the dock, looking happy if not as hearty as he’d once been. The ship’s physician was told that he’d need to report to the program office on Monday for a debrief; then he, like the rest of the crew, would be free to take some well-earned vacation. He and his wife, Laura, already had a plan—to borrow their son’s pickup with camper top and sleep their way up the coast, toward Santa Barbara, under the stars.

  There’d been plenty of time to dissect and discuss the mission’s shortcomings, and most everyone on the crew agreed that everything that didn’t work on the mission could be fixed. The claw could be remade, better and stronger, and so could other elements of the ship that had been built or assembled hastily in the rush to get to sea in July.

  By the time the Explorer’s personnel left Pier E, the general consensus was that those crewmen who wanted to go back and finish the job would be given their chance. And that process began a few weeks later, when the ship pulled back out of the harbor and sailed to Catalina, where the capture vehicle was demated, returned to the HMB-1, and carried north to Redwood City, where it would be rebuilt with some design changes, including a different, stronger steel for the tines.

  • • •

  Once he returned to Washington, Parangosky moved quickly to get a follow-up mission under way. Project Azorian might have come to a close, but Project Matador was only beginning. Those who’d been instrumental in bringing Azorian to fruition—in particular, NURO director Dave Potter—were mostly in support of a follow-up mission to recover the rest of the submarine, but critics of the operation were emboldened by the original recovery’s failures.

  The two factions argued through the late fall and over the holidays into early 1975, when Kissinger presented a memo to the president summing up the situation: “With justifiable pride, the intelligence community climaxed a six-year effort last year by lifting from the ocean floor in the Pacific a Soviet submarine which sank there in 1968,” Kissinger wrote. This “unique accomplishment” was marred, he admitted, when a portion of the submarine broke away during capture, but the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) believed that the value of the intelligence assets still inside the sub, in combination with the “sizable investment ($250 million to date),” warranted a review, which had just been completed.

  That review had been positive, Kissinger reported. “The USIB has reaffirmed its view” tha
t the equipment aboard the submarine is of “unique intelligence potential,” and its estimate of the overall gain from a successful recovery has not “measurably” changed. “Cover and security for this operation have been remarkably maintained, but there are obvious risks in extending the operation for several more months.” The Soviets, as everyone knew, had been suspicious of the Glomar during the primary mission, and it seemed extraordinarily unlikely that they wouldn’t at least return with more curiosity the second time the giant ship appeared in the same area of the Pacific. But nothing in the news reports so far had revealed any tangible information; the denials were plausible, and—Kissinger noted to Ford—preparations for a return had already begun. “The equipment that broke during the lifting of the heavy target is being redesigned. An estimated $25,576,000 has been committed, and $36,424,000 more will be required to complete a second operation.” Lastly, and importantly, that money had already been allocated. No new funds would be required, which is the kind of fact that makes decisions a whole lot easier for politicians.

  Which didn’t mean that approval was a slam dunk. When the 40 Committee met to discuss Azorian, Kissinger told Ford, the loudest objections came from the undersecretary of state for political affairs, a man who would be directly in the line of fire for Soviet backlash, should there be any. The undersecretary argued that the risks of going back outweighed the value of the leftover intelligence on the seafloor, “and that a return to the exact spot of ocean will feed Soviet suspicion; and that new uncertainties in US–Soviet relations add to the substantial political risks should there be a Soviet reaction.”

  This was a reasonable objection, but it failed. All of the other members of the 40 Committee were in agreement that a second recovery attempt was worth it and should be approved. “The deep ocean mining cover story has been accepted widely and the Soviets did not show any undue suspicion during the first operation,” Kissinger reported; “therefore it is reasonable to expect that they will accept a return to the site as what it will appear to be—a second deep ocean mining trial.” In summation, Kissinger wrote, there was a consensus: “That the potential intelligence return from a successful second mission would be significant enough to accept the cost, cover/security and other risks.”

  • • •

  Until someone told him otherwise, Parangosky was moving forward, and so was the organization that had been built up around him. NURO arranged for the USS Seawolf to depart her West Coast base and head to the target site. Seawolf was the latest special projects submarine to emerge and conduct covert activities in support of the CIA and NSA, in the tradition of the Halibut, and the sub slipped quietly out into the Pacific and took a new round of high-resolution photographs of the target—photographs that assured analysts that what had fallen back to the sea remained intact enough to justify another mission.

  The program office had gone quiet for the interval after the mission, while the ship was off Hawaii, but it never closed, and as a plan to go back for the rest of the submarine was just being formulated back in Washington, Curtis Crooke reassembled his engineers to begin studying the necessary fixes.

  The biggest problem, obviously, was the claw. The tines had broken, and that, a postmortem evaluation concluded, was due to a series of factors—the most important being a poor choice of steel. This, really, was a problem that could be traced all the way back to the Glomar II. That ship’s inability to get a proper soil sample meant that no one knew what the seafloor was like, and engineers had therefore chosen the hardest possible steel. But extremely hard steel isn’t infallible. It’s stiff, but it won’t bend. Subject it to too much stress and it’ll crack, like glass. The tines had held up during the initial contact with the bottom, through the process of unloading more weight to force them into the soil, and even for the pickup and lift. But once the submarine was inside the grabber, it moved around, causing the weight to shift from one davit to another, which created a shock wave that snapped the fingers of two-inch-steel plate.

  There was some bickering back and forth between the engineers of Lockheed and Global Marine after the mission’s completion; in private, Parangosky felt that Crooke and the systems integration team should have picked up the problem in advance, but as a good manager he recognized that nothing positive could come of criticizing his key engineers in retrospect. We should have recognized it and we didn’t, he told the team. Accept that and move on.

  This time, the tines would be made of low-carbon HY-100 steel and handled by Global Marine, which subcontracted the job to their old friends at Sun Ship in Chester, where an enormous heat-treating oven built for the original ship construction came in handy once again.

  Forging the new davits wasn’t a complicated job for Sun Ship; getting them out to Redwood City for assembly on the rebuilt capture vehicle, however, was. The enormous steel fingers were too big to hide inside truck trailers and had to be strapped onto flatbeds that exceeded the typical size allowed on American interstates. The rigs would be officially oversize, requiring special clearance to pass through certain more persnickety states. The Agency hired one of its more clever trucking contractors, Leonard Brothers, from Miami. Leonard did various special transport jobs for the government and was known for having excellent relationships with the highway inspectors of most US states. Leonard Brothers agents kept detailed records of which inspectors were most difficult, and which were more lenient, and what shifts everyone worked. Schedules were then optimized to run the loads across problematic states when the friendliest inspectors were on duty. If necessary, they’d slip a case of Jack Daniel’s off the truck when passing through as a thank-you.

  As engineers at the program office awaited the next stage, morale was high. From the moment they all reassembled, Hank Van Calcar later said, the conversation was all about how to fix the problems and go back: “It wasn’t, ‘It’s over with.’ It was, ‘Okay, on to the next phase.’”

  62

  The Beginning of the End

  Sometime in the late fall, while the Explorer was back in port in Long Beach, and work had already begun inside the HMB-1 at Redwood City to repair Clementine for a second trip to the bottom, a package was slipped under the door of the Soviet embassy in Washington. Inside was a note. It read: “Certain authorities of the United States are taking measures to raise the Soviet submarine sunk in the Pacific Ocean” and was signed by “Well-wisher.”

  Tips and leads poured into the embassy on a regular basis, and most were misinformed, useless, or completely without merit, but those with some credence were passed up the ladder to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who in this case took the note seriously enough to raise the matter with his superiors back in Moscow. Their response was nonplussed, even dismissive. Rumors of American meddling with the missing sub weren’t a new thing, and now, as before, the naval command considered the prospect ridiculous. As far as the admirals were concerned, it was simply impossible for anyone to salvage a submarine from three miles under the sea—and this was hardly a stubborn position; most engineers on earth at the time would concur.

  Whether and how the Soviets reacted internally is something we still don’t know, and layers of obfuscation and misinformation have been settling on this story like silt ever since. But rumors, apparently, also began to scatter around Washington.

  In December 1974, according to a former head of Naval Intelligence who told the author Norman Polmar, a Soviet officer approached a US Navy captain at an annual party for foreign naval attachés and said that the Russians were aware of the CIA’s attempt and that it would be unwise for another mission to be launched. “If you go back,” he allegedly said, “it would mean war.”

  • • •

  Then, on Friday, February 7, the late edition of the Los Angeles Times landed on doorsteps around that city with a thump that echoed back to Langley and beyond. Above the fold on page A1 was a near-half-page headline that no one had seen coming: US REPORTED AFTER RUSS SUB. The story, by staff wr
iters William Farr and Jerry Cohen, was accompanied by two large photos—one of a Soviet sub that wasn’t anything like the K-129, and one of the Glomar Explorer docked in Long Beach—and sketched out the basics of the CIA–Hughes arrangement, “according to reports circulating among local law enforcement officials.”

  The story was riddled with mistakes and incorrect speculation, starting with the target of the operation. The Times story guessed that the mission, if indeed it was real, “is likely to have involved one of two Soviet undersea vessels”—both of them nuclear-powered subs lost after 1970 in the Atlantic Ocean.

  News of the leak reached Washington late in the afternoon, and Director Colby happened to be going to the White House already, for a meeting with Ford and several key advisers, including Kissinger, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jones, and the president’s main assistant, Donald “Rummie” Rumsfeld, in the Cabinet Room. January 1975 was a turbulent month for the intelligence community, with Sy Hersh’s revelations of the CIA’s so-called family jewels—a series of disturbing and in some cases illegal acts perpetrated by the Agency in recent years. Among the shocking admissions made by Colby in an open session of Congress was that the CIA had spied on US antiwar activists, opened Jane Fonda’s mail from Russia, and made several unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders.

  That was not Ford’s agenda on the day in early January when the LA Times story hit, however; he had called the meeting of his advisers to discuss leaks from the National Security Council.

  “I hate to raise this, but the Los Angeles Times just asked whether we had raised a piece of a Soviet submarine,” Colby told the president, adding that he’d already instructed Frank Murphy, on his security staff, to “try to kill it” and that “it doesn’t seem to be a Washington leak.”