by Josh Dean
Hank Van Calcar received a call in the middle of the night from one of Azorian’s security officers, who wanted him to know that the story was going to come out that day and would probably be everywhere. That evening, Hank turned on the evening news and called his wife, Carolyn, into the den. “Come take a look at this,” he said, as his wife sat down and watched, dumbfounded, as a newscaster told a story that she almost couldn’t believe. The mining program she thought her husband had been working on for three years had been a lie.
“That is what you’ve been doing all this time?” she said, her voice shaking. “What else haven’t you been telling me?”
Carolyn was distraught that her husband had hid something this big from her for years. She left the room and Hank gave her space, but eventually she came back in and sat down again.
“You know, I was thinking about if I had had the opportunity to do what you’re doing—would I have done the same?” she said. “I would have.”
That was the end of it.
Captain Harry Jackson was back home in Groton, Connecticut, having breakfast with his wife, when a news segment came over the radio, explaining what had occurred on Jack Anderson’s radio program.
Once the report finished, his wife looked over and locked eyes with her husband.
“Did you hear what I just heard?” she asked.
“Yep,” he replied.
“Were you there?”
Jackson sipped from his mug of coffee.
“I don’t know,” he said.
69
The End Is the End, Isn’t It?
APRIL–MAY 1975
The consensus in the intelligence community was that Matador was finished, and Parangosky knew it, too, but he’d yet to be given any official order, so out at the West Coast program office, three thousand miles away from the various rooms in which powerful men were pondering the operation’s future, all of the Azorian engineers pushed on, having shifted fully into Matador mode.
It was a very different environment this time. Many of the engineers had been with the program throughout the design and buildup, adhering to strict protocols in place to maintain absolute secrecy, so it was hard to believe now that things could actually continue. For years, Mr. P’s refrain had been that if any one person breathed a single word, publicly, the mission would be canceled. Then a story appeared in a major American newspaper and nothing happened. Later, it was on the radio, and then everywhere. And yet, as of mid-April, Matador wasn’t dead.
Within a day of Jack Anderson’s radio broadcast, Pier E became a hive of activity that was, for the first time since the union strike, barely controlled chaos. The HGE was now a fortress besieged, as local, regional, and national newspeople poured into Long Beach. Helicopters carrying network TV crews hovered over the ship. Reporters frequented the local bars and deployed many of the dirtier tricks of their trade to identify knowledgeable sources and persuade them to talk. Waterfront hangers-on were plied with drinks, and prostitutes were enlisted in attempts to buy crew manifests. Crew members were pestered, badgered, and propositioned.
The security team gave repeated crew briefings on the dangers of any kind of conversation with people from the news media; their admonition was: “Don’t answer any question, no matter how trivial, about the Glomar Explorer or its purpose.” And the crew and other workers responded by holding the line, even when the press contacted their families at home or came at them directly with offers of substantial sums of money.
Security was further heightened due to a series of bombing threats in the LA area, and especially after a Catalina tour boat was destroyed by a radical group at a pier in the nearby Los Angeles harbor. Howard Hughes and his reported relationship with the CIA made the HGE a natural target for radicals, and security mounted a deck watch to warn of any suspicious approaches to the ship from the harbor channel. Antiswimmer nets were made and kept on the main deck to be thrown into the water at the first sight of any swimmers approaching the hull. Packages, sacks, and bags were opened, inspected, and stamped by security.
There were more alarming signs, too. Russian ships began to arrive more frequently, docking at a pier directly across the channel, where suspiciously little activity seemed to take place around them. Because Matador was still an active program, anyone who’d been selected for the crew had no choice but to prepare as if the operation was happening, which meant assuring wives and loved ones that this wouldn’t be a suicide mission—an argument complicated by reports that the Russians were planning naval exercises in the North Pacific, in the same area as the target site.
John Parsons was one of those men. His marriage had barely survived the first trip, and now, with an infant son at home, he was going to be asked to head back out, under much more perilous circumstances. He, like everyone in the program, was aware of the story of the USS Pueblo, the captured Navy ship that was never rescued. That crew went to sea believing that a plan was in place to intervene if it were ever seized. “We were told the same thing, that there’s a plan, but that you aren’t cleared to know what the plan is,” Parsons later recalled. “I figured it out. There was no plan.”
• • •
On April 16, at precisely midnight, the Explorer was tugged out to Long Beach’s outer harbor to prepare for a new round of sea testing on the improved pipe system. As soon as the sun rose, news choppers resumed their hovering and harassed the ship until it sailed toward the Channel Islands and out of range. Those crew members who weren’t preparing for the process of mating with Clementine watched their own ship sail out of the harbor on the evening news that night, in the mess, and when the Explorer reached the coast of Catalina Island again, on April 20, a fleet of private yachts and sailboats swarmed the famous ship to photograph its every movement.
Global Marine’s VP for corporate planning, Corbett U. Allen, Jr., had told reporters in advance that the Explorer was going to sea “to test modifications” but refused to elaborate on what those modifications were, nor would he comment on any news reports about the submarine or CIA. “This ship is a prototype piece of equipment,” he said. “The whole project is a sensitive project and there are a lot of things we can’t say about it.”
Despite some complications, the tests were seen as a success and the ship returned to Pier E on Sunday, April 27, the same day Parade magazine ran a feature titled THE RACE FOR RICHES ON THE OCEAN FLOOR. The story reported that “more than half a dozen companies” had been in competition to be the first to successfully mine manganese nodules from the ocean and said that, in light of revelations about the true purpose of the Glomar Explorer, a company called Deepsea Ventures was in the lead, having already used a vacuum-suction-type device to remove nodules from a depth of three thousand feet.
Three days later, on April 30, the HMB-1 left Redwood City with the revamped Clementine in its belly and motored south toward Catalina. The plan, if Matador wasn’t canceled, was to remate with the Explorer around May 5, spend a few weeks in port, then return to sea on May 29 for a final round of integrated sea tests before setting out for the target site, this time via Midway, because Hawaii had politely requested that the ship not use Lahaina as a base.
That was one of many signs that this trip would be different. Another, more ominous one, was a report that five Soviet missile-tracking ships had gathered four hundred miles off the coast of Midway—an act that could have been a coincidence, or a clear signal that the Soviets wouldn’t be sitting back this time if the Hughes Glomar Explorer decided to go back out after the sub.
Other adventures during the sea tests included a brief encounter with the US Navy, which asked the ship to deviate course to accommodate a live-fire air-to-sea missile test, only to be told, by Captain Gresham—back at the helm—that the commander might want to check those priorities with Washington; and an influx of sharks that arrived in the moon pool during pipe-string tests, a problem that enterprising crew members took advantag
e of, baiting hooks with chunks of meat and sportfishing right there inside the massive vessel. Sharks weren’t the only animal interlopers. Seabirds had gotten inside and went fishing, too, by diving into the water and catching an array of smaller fish that couldn’t escape far without swimming into the well walls.
On May 5, the Explorer left Long Beach again and returned to the same cove off Catalina Island, to repeat the docking procedure that had first been done eleven months prior. The HMB-1 was submerged, again. The HGE was positioned over the top of it, again. And the new, improved, even stronger version of Clementine was pulled up through the roof of the barge and into the ship’s moon pool by the docking legs, again. Then the ship returned to port until May 31, when the ship and crew went back to sea to test all of the systems in preparation for a return to the target site, as soon as possible. By June 11, all of the required tests had been completed and the mission command felt ready to proceed.
70
That’s All She Wrote
JUNE 1975
Matador had been doomed for months, but the final decision didn’t come down until June 16, when Kissinger delivered his official recommendation to the president, in the form of a memorandum—more than a month after Clementine had returned to the Explorer’s belly.
The secretary of state began by repeating what he’d said in his last memo, just before the leaks broke in February—that “the intelligence exploitation of the part that was recovered was of such significance, and the prospects of what we might obtain if we were to recover more of the submarine were so promising,” that the 40 Committee had wanted to go back to complete the job. “You approved these preparations on 6 February,” Kissinger wrote, the day before the LA Times broke the story of the CIA’s submarine mission.
“Preparations for a possible second mission continued because we wanted to avoid any official confirmation of the press revelations by abruptly terminating the operation,” he wrote, and also because no one knew if or how the Soviets would react. Maybe, by some miracle, they’d miss the news, or ignore it. Since that time, Soviet officials had made their displeasure known, using back channels to keep the matter discreet. “It is now clear that the Soviets have no intention of allowing us to conduct a second mission without interference,” he said. Most obviously, a “Soviet ocean-going tug has been on station at the target site since 28 March, and there is every indication that the Soviets intend to maintain a watch there.”
As a result, Kissinger reported, the 40 Committee met on June 15—the previous day—to make a recommendation. “It was the reluctant, but unanimous, conclusion of the Committee that the risk of a Soviet reaction was too great to warrant a second recovery attempt. Postponement was considered, but any change in the Soviet position was deemed unlikely. Therefore, it was agreed that the Committee recommend that Project MATADOR be terminated.” Kissinger noted that the process of disengaging from “this complicated program” would take some time, and that “additional publicity can be expected.” A plan to dispose of “the assets” was already being explored and the president would be given options. He finished: “I recommend that you approve the termination of Project MATADOR.”
• • •
The Matador crew had been ready to go for weeks, and for the first half of June, the men were mostly sitting idle at the program office, waiting for the phone to ring. And a week before the estimated departure date, in mid-June, it did.
Any call that came in over the bubble phone was significant, and this one certainly was. Dave Sharp knew Parangosky would be on the other end and that he’d have important news, which could be good or bad, and was probably bad. Parangosky told his most senior engineer, a man who’d been with the program from its very inception, that “the highest authority” was killing the program, effective immediately. There would be no return to the target site.
Parangosky was in no mood to talk at length, and the bubble phone’s garbled line made conversation frustrating anyway, but Sharp was able to pick up the basics of what had led to this decision. The United States and Soviet Union had been negotiating by back channel and had agreed to a deal in which the United States would not publicly acknowledge or discuss in any way the 1974 recovery operation, and the Soviets, in return, would not publicly protest the events. For all intents and purposes, both sides would pretend as if the boldest and most outlandish intelligence operation in history had never happened. No one would ever speak of it again.
Sharp recalls that he pushed for only one detail: Was there a single argument or event that tipped the Ford administration toward canceling Matador? “The Russians,” Parangosky told him. “They told us that if we try it, they’ll stop it.”
Many Azorian veterans would never forget where they were when they got the news of the program’s end. Dr. John Rutten had been home from the sea tests for just one day when he got the call from his superior, Dr. Flickinger. It was six thirty A.M. on Friday the thirteenth, of all days.
Rutten’s work on the Explorer wasn’t fully complete, however. On August 19, he drove back to Long Beach, stopping at the airport to drop his youngest son, who wasn’t quite eighteen, off for a flight to North Dakota, and then went on to Pier E, where he was to board the ship and supervise the hospital during the Glomar Explorer’s final act—demating the CV into the HMB-1 one last time.
At this point, not even that act, which no longer required secrecy, could be easily finished. Philip Watson was still pestering Parangosky, who’d told Walt Lloyd to find a way to solve the matter. LA’s tax assessor managed to win a court order requiring the ship to stay in port until it paid a 7.5-million-dollar tax bill or produced proof that it was not owned by the Summa Corporation. Watson hadn’t just delayed the ship’s departure. He actually shut down the pier, ordering police to lock the gates and hang signs from the fences announcing NOTICE OF COUNTY TAX COLLECTOR’S SALE. If the Summa Corporation did not settle its tax bill, the signs stated, LA County would hold a public auction for the ship’s sale on August 27.
Watson was grandstanding. He was also irritated because he felt that the government was giving him the runaround. He had already been told, in secret, that the ship belonged to the CIA—a process that required he be “read into” the program in order to hear the truth, and then “read out” so that he could never repeat that truth to anyone, or risk prosecution. What seemed to frustrate Watson was that every time he saw a news report, the US government denied owning the ship and repeated the lie that it was Summa’s ship. That was the official story, even if most people now knew it was a total lie.
• • •
Eventually, Walt Lloyd got Watson off of Summa’s back, and on August 20, the Explorer left port for its final mission as a CIA vessel. The destination, it announced, would be Catalina Island, but the specific purpose of the planned “sea tests” trip was not revealed. The CIA at this point was playing political games, trying to say nothing publicly as a favor to the Soviets, so when a foggy night turned into a clear day and the gigantic ship wasn’t actually off Catalina, or anywhere on the horizon, the local media freaked out, again.
Yet the explanation was simple: a Soviet ship called the AGI Sarachev had been spotted and was on a rendezvous course to encounter the Explorer en route to Catalina around eleven thirty A.M. the following day. To avoid any interactions with the Soviet ship, the Explorer was told to take a more erratic course. The captain set his radar at forty-eight miles to keep an eye out for any suspicious traffic and then began to sail the Explorer in squares, proceeding straight ahead until any ship was seen to be tracking the vessel, at which point he’d turn ninety degrees and sail at the vessel, in the hopes that it would change course. And sure enough, the Soviet ship did just that. After a full day of zigs and zags, the Explorer changed course again and headed for Catalina, with its arrival planned for August 23.
GLOMAR VANISHES ON CATALINA TRIP, the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram announced that morning. The famous spy
ship, the paper reported, “vanished Friday” while on what should have been a simple twenty-six-mile journey south. “Its whereabouts were unknown to all maritime agencies, including the company that designed and says it directs the ship”—that company being Global Marine, which was under orders to say exactly that.
Two days later, the Explorer arrived at Isthmus Cove and, according to the paper, “unceremoniously anchored” in full view of the public, with no explanation for its recent whereabouts, or why it had taken three days to cover twenty-six miles of placid ocean. “I kept hearing on the radio about six o’clock this morning, ‘Where is the Glomar Explorer?’” a Catalina resident told reporters. “Then I went down the hill to work, at about 7:45, and there sat the ship.”
On the morning of August 24, the Explorer’s crew began preparations for transfer in thick fog, as an ever-growing fleet of rowboats, skiffs, fishing boats, and yachts bobbed off of either side, overloaded with passengers whose curiosity was piqued by the press reports. The crew began to flood the moon pool that night and then, hours later, lowered Clementine out through the sea gates and into the water, where the HMB-1 waited on the ocean floor, 160 feet below.
Once the claw was gone, the last of the Agency engineers, led by Redjack Stephenson, caught the final helicopter back to shore.
• • •
Because of the mystery of the voyage to Catalina, even the Explorer’s seemingly simple final act attracted controversy. This time, it was a local treasure hunter named Chuck Kenworthy, whose company, Quest Enterprises, had acquired exclusive rights to explore for sunken riches in the area around Catalina. Kenworthy was suspicious of the Explorer and its location and decided that whatever the ship claimed to be doing was another lie; consequently, he announced to the local media in October, the Glomar Explorer had secretly raided the Spanish galleon San Pedro, which hit rocks and sank in 1598, and had stolen gold that was rightfully his.
