The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  It was a cheeky thing to say, playing on the now-so-common-that-it’s-a-cliché denial/nondenial that all intelligence agencies and other governmental entities use, but there’s an interesting history to this phrase and it relates directly back to Project Azorian.

  After the mass of press leaks that led to the operation’s disclosure, President Ford took the advice of Kissinger and Colby and said nothing officially about the operation to steal K-129. That silence continued after Ford and became official government policy—no one would say anything, at all, about the greatest covert operation in American history.

  But that actually wasn’t good enough. The story was out there in the media, and the CIA director had, at one time, confirmed it, at least privately. And in 1976, a Rolling Stone reporter named Harriet Ann Phillippi filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the Glomar Explorer, especially Colby’s efforts to stifle press coverage.

  The Freedom of Information Act requires that a federal agency release documents unless there is a good reason that this is not possible—for instance, for national security, in which case it must say that a request is being denied for this reason. But that wouldn’t work here. To deny the release of documents on national security grounds would be admitting that such documents really existed. And when the problem of the requests landed on the desk of John Warner, CIA counsel, he called on Walt Lloyd, once again, to help him solve it.

  After Matador was canceled, Warner asked Lloyd to be assigned to his office, to be helpful in situations just like this one. Thanks to what Lloyd calls “the tremendous load of legal issues generated by the boat project,” he had made himself an expert and Warner wanted him on his staff. The first big job Warner handed Lloyd was the FOIA problem. Requests had been pouring in and were piling up on the desks of the young attorneys who worked for Warner. “With all of your experience in this goddamn program,” said Warner, who never loved Azorian, “you go down there and figure out how we should be answering the public.”

  It was a unique legal challenge. On one hand, the Freedom of Information Act provided, by law, that there would be more public transparency. When someone asks a federal agency a question about what it’s been doing, it has to answer, by law. On the flip side, the director of Central Intelligence is responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods. Both are federal laws.

  Lloyd walked out and went to see the overwhelmed attorneys, buried in papers and under duress because they didn’t know what to tell their boss about how to answer.

  Okay, Lloyd said. “We can’t confirm this allegation of this use of the ship to go and do all these things”—which was at that time still top secret, at the order of the president and the director. Basically, then, they couldn’t confirm it without revealing an intelligence method. They also couldn’t deny it, by law, without lying. “So we can neither confirm nor can we deny,” Lloyd said.

  He thought about what he’d just said. It made perfect sense. Lloyd wrote the phrase down and walked back into John Warner’s office.

  “This is the answer as far as I can see,” he said.

  Warner looked at the paper. It was clear. It was simple. It was legal. He tweaked a few words but said he was pleased. “That’s the answer,” he said. “I like it.”

  Phillippi and her attorney didn’t, however. They appealed the CIA’s nondenial and the case was heard by the US Court of Appeals. The judge listened to the arguments, considered the CIA’s peculiar statement, and answered: It was a valid response.

  Thus was born the Glomar response.

  And that’s the history of the most famous and frustrating cliché in PR.

  EPILOGUE

  The Last Days of Mr. P

  The end of the program also meant the end of John Parangosky’s incredible CIA career. When Matador was canceled, he retired at age fifty-four, having served the Agency almost from its inception through four of the boldest and most successful covert intelligence operations in history. In retirement, Mr. P settled into a quiet life nearly as mysterious as the one he inhabited at the Agency. He kept listening to opera, kept playing his violin, and kept eating out at his favorite restaurants, especially La Salle du Bois at Eighteenth and M in Washington, DC. There was one big change, however. Some years later—around 1980 is the best guess—the bachelor hero of the DDS&T got married, to a woman named Renee Davis.

  Like Parangosky, Davis was fond of eating out at the same time every night, by herself, often at La Salle du Bois. The two saw each other, time after time, dining alone, and then one night decided to join forces and eat together. In short order, they were married.

  Not long after, Walt Lloyd ran into the couple in a restaurant near Langley. “She had changed him,” he recalls. “He was happy as hell.” He’d even given up the slicked hair. It was, Lloyd recalls, “fluffed up.” The marriage, alas, didn’t last. The couple divorced a year later, but in that short time Parangosky had grown close to Renee’s daughter, and they stayed close after.

  Parangosky did take some occasional consulting work. Curtis Crooke hired him in the 1980s to go to Japan and look into a group of men who had asked Global Marine to help find the Awa Maru, the Japanese freighter sunk by an American submarine after World War II and rumored to have been carrying a fortune in gold. “The thought was, if you can steal a submarine, you can steal a freighter of gold,” Crooke told me. That job never actually materialized, and the last Crooke heard, Parangosky had fallen on ice and was in a Virginia nursing home. He was no longer able to drive. Crooke bought him a CD player and several discs of Jussi Björling, the Swedish opera tenor Parangosky loved, and mailed it all to his stepdaughter. He never heard back.

  Walt Lloyd kept in more regular touch. He and Parangosky would talk periodically on the phone, and when he heard about the fall, Lloyd called his old friend to find out what happened. It had been icy, Parangosky told him, and he’d fallen backward, hitting his head on the steps. He was knocked unconscious, and that’s how a neighbor found him, out cold in the snow. Parangosky was admitted to a hospital and improved, but never fully. He had considerable trouble walking after the accident and his health deteriorated.

  During a trip back east, Lloyd, along with his wife, Monte, went to visit his old friend. He rented a car and drove out to the Heritage Hall Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Leesburg, Virginia. Parangosky was asleep when he got there. A nurse said, “I’m not sure he’ll wake,” and Lloyd replied that he didn’t want to disrupt his sleep. He walked over and was leaning in, studying his former boss’s face to get a sense of how his old friend was doing, when Parangosky snapped awake and looked at him, as surprised as anyone would be to wake from a nap and see an old friend staring intently from a few inches above one’s face. Parangosky was immediately very alert, and his face, as always, swelled with character. Lloyd introduced him to Monte, and Parangosky seemed genuinely touched that Lloyd had thought to bring her. For several hours, the three of them just sat and talked. Lloyd felt both pleased and sad when he left.

  Few people knew that a year after his retirement, in 1976, Parangosky was given the National Security Medal, an award created by President Harry Truman to honor Americans who had made an “outstanding contribution to the National Intelligence Effort,” consisting of “either meritorious service performed in a position of high responsibility or an act of valor requiring personal courage of a high degree.” Parangosky was just the nineteenth person to receive the medal since its creation in 1953.

  This wasn’t his only medal, either. On the occasion of the CIA’s fiftieth anniversary, in 1997, Parangosky was given one of the Agency’s highest honors, too. He was named one of the fifty “Trailblazers” who had shaped the CIA in its first half century. The award cited his work on the U-2, the A-12, and Corona, but did not mention the Glomar Explorer. “A pioneer in marshaling the technical capabilities of industry for the Intelligence Community, Mr. Parangosky is recognized for his m
anagement of the joint contractor team that produced the world’s fastest and highest flying stealth reconnaissance aircraft,” the accompanying citation stated. “His contributions paved the way for creating the Directorate of Science and Technology.” Three years later, the National Reconnaissance Office gave Parangosky a similar honor, naming him one of the forty “Pioneers” in National Reconnaissance on the occasion of the NRO’s fortieth anniversary. Mr. P. accepted the awards quietly and, one presumes, proudly, but never spoke of them with anyone. He brought his stepdaughter Theresa Vaughan to both ceremonies. And on September 9, 2004, he died of pneumonia at Loudon Hospital in Loudon, Virginia. He was 84.

  The Long View

  We thought, with luck, that we could keep the Glomar Explorer project secret for a year. We kept it secret for over five years.

  —Paul Reeve

  This is one of the darkest, most tragic, and most mysterious tragedies of our Navy in all of its history.

  —Soviet naval historian and submariner Nikolai Cherkashin

  In October 1992, Robert Gates passed through the Kremlin gates in the US ambassador’s limousine, under police escort, on his way to meet Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Gates was the first CIA director ever to visit Moscow, after forty-five tense years of crisis after crisis, some of which nearly led the world’s two superpowers to go to war. “As a gesture of intent, a symbol of a new era, I arrived with the Soviet naval flag that had shrouded the coffins of the half dozen Soviet sailors whose remains the Glomar Explorer had recovered when it raised part of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine from deep in the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1970s,” he wrote in his memoir From the Shadows. “I also was taking to Yeltsin a videotape of their burial at sea, complete with prayers for the dead and the Soviet national anthem—a dignified and respectful service even at the height of the Cold War.” Gates also handed over a few items that had been kept from the K-129—most notably, the diving bell, with its dented top—and gave Yeltsin the precise coordinates of the burial site, ninety miles southwest of Hawaii’s Big Island, so that any family members of the lost crewmen who wanted to visit the site would now be able to do so.

  This Moscow trip was indicative of the rapid thaw in relations between the two countries that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It also caused the Russian government to publicly admit the loss of the K-129 for the first time, twenty-four years after it vanished under circumstances that remain, to this day, mysterious. That admission vindicated the tireless work of numerous family members of the lost submariners, in particular Irina Zhuravina, widow of the submarine’s thirty-four-year-old executive officer, Alexander Zhuravin.

  The loss of the ninety-eight men on the K-129 wasn’t the only tragedy of the sub’s sinking. The Soviet Union was disrespectful to the families in the aftermath, telling them only that the submarine had been lost and that its sailors were all presumed dead. Because the Soviet Navy couldn’t locate the wreck and had no bodies to prove the men’s deaths, the Soviet leadership refused to issue pension benefits to the widows and parents. “We were told nothing for months, and then warned, ‘Do not place your personal interest above the interest of the state,’” Zhuravina told the author Ken Sewell more than thirty years later. One admiral advised her “to forget about it and not stir up the past.”

  On March 7, 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster, the Russian government posthumously awarded Medals of Courage to all of the K-129’s crew members. It was, according to Zhuravina, an empty gesture. She told a Russian TV show that the mother of twenty-year-old Yurii Dubov was ruined by the sub’s loss. “For thirty years his mother lived with the hope that he was alive,” Zhuravina said. “She couldn’t believe that her son was dead. She lived, and waited, and hoped.” Officers from each submariner’s native region delivered those medals to the families, and it wasn’t until Dubov’s mother got hers that she finally accepted his death. And the next day, March 8, she died. “Just like her son,” Zhuravina said. “Her heart gave out.”

  Zhuravina bought a stone etched with a photo of her husband in his Navy uniform and put it up over an empty grave in a Moscow cemetery, right next to the plot where their son, Mikhail, a nuclear plant engineer, was buried earlier in 1992, after dying of cancer. “I’ll never be a seaman,” he told his mother when he was a boy. And finally, after thirty years of fighting with the Soviet Navy, Irina was given a spot on a tanker ship headed for the Pacific, to visit the wreck site. She brought Igor Orekhov, who was eight when his father, chief engineer Nikolai Orekhov, was lost at sea. The trip was long and rough—the tanker sailed through a typhoon en route—but when it reached the coordinates, 40 degrees latitude, 180 degrees longitude, it paused so that the two could drop flowers into the water, 16,500 above whatever remains of their loved ones were still down there.

  ◆

  On July 20, 2006, dozens of surviving Azorian contractors gathered at the headquarters of GlobalSantaFe—the conglomerate that ultimately swallowed Global Marine—for a ceremony. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers was honoring Global Marine and the other contractors who contributed to the project by naming the Hughes Glomar Explorer a mechanical engineering “landmark”—just the 239th object ever to receive this revered distinction. “In the short years of its design and construction the modern limits of ‘state of the art’ were extended from the impossible to the possible,” the ASME citation said.

  Curtis Crooke accepted the award and told a few stories about the operation, saying that he was unable to even use the project’s real name, because as of 2006, the word “Azorian” itself was still classified.

  Praise for the engineering on Azorian has been near universal. William A. Nierenberg, a former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a young science section leader on the Manhattan Project, has compared “the achievement of constructing the Glomar Explorer” with that project. Admiral J. Edward Snyder, former oceanographer of the Navy, told Science that the system “is probably the greatest technical achievement in ocean engineering in my lifetime.”

  • • •

  The true story of how Azorian leaked to the media is one of the most enduring mysteries. Whether or not there ever was really a Hughes memo at Romaine Street is debated, as is the entire story of the break-in—numerous people have asserted over the years that it may have been a CIA inside job, as part of a cover-up of the Agency’s ties to Hughes.

  What I heard, again and again, from retired Agency personnel was that they are certain that—somehow, in some way—the leaks can be traced back to someone (or a few people) at the Navy. The feeling among CIA veterans is that certain factions of the Navy, particularly within its science and engineering group, never liked the program. They resented that a huge and complicated underwater operation would go to the CIA and that it was going to be paid for out of the Navy’s own black budget. And once the mission failed to get the entire sub, these figures, whoever they were, weren’t going to sit back and watch the CIA spend more money to go back and try again. So they found a way to kill the program using the media.

  One veteran of several DDS&T black programs told me that he has no proof that this is the case, but his gut instinct tells him it’s true. He says that the Navy watched the CIA take over spy planes and develop the first satellites and it took a vicious fight for the Air Force to regain control of space operations. “They said, ‘Those sons of bitches are building a Navy.’ That’s motive.”

  An equally enduring mystery is how much Howard Hughes actually knew about Azorian, if he knew anything at all. There’s little doubt that Hughes was falling apart by 1971, popping opioids like Tic Tacs and mostly slumped in a recliner watching movies, but a few credible sources have told me they’re sure he was at least periodically paying attention.

  His PR man, Arelo Sederberg, was certain. “There is no doubt that Hughes knew about it, if no doubt was possible with anything concerning him, and in his drug-fogged state he pr
obably felt smugly content to do a favor for the powerful CIA, with no quid pro quo expected,” Sederberg wrote. “The CIA said he knew, as did Raymond Holliday, the Hughes executive who had initially been approached by the CIA. [Bill] Gay and [Chester] Davis also knew.”

  I was unable to find a single person who met Hughes, but a retired intelligence officer who knew Parangosky well swore to me that Hughes did meet Azorian’s maestro once. As the story goes, Hughes had a favorite plane, a Lockheed Constellation that he kept at Burbank airport and liked to visit when he was in Los Angeles, usually just to sit in the cockpit and hold the controls. At some point, the CIA decided that it needed a plane to use for trips back and forth to Area 51. The Agency inquired, through Hughes’s go-betweens, if they could use the Constellation. After many false alarms, the Agency was notified of a meeting—Parangosky was to be at the entrance to the LA city dump at midnight on a particular night. Shortly after he arrived, a limousine pulled up and stopped. A door opened, and out stepped Hughes himself. He said few if any words, handed Parangosky the keys, and got back into the car, which drove away.

  • • •

  The thing that people will probably debate forever about Azorian is whether or not the largest covert operation in CIA history should be considered a triumph. The fact that the Agency built and protected a cover story for five years is undeniable; by that measure alone, the project was a success. And the program engineers, led by John Graham, did design and build the most complicated ship in history, a vessel that everyone considers a marvel. That ship was able to do something that seemed nearly impossible—to reach down to the floor of the ocean and pick up a single object from 16,500 feet without anyone noticing. The depth alone is unbelievable.

  Just ask Admiral Dygalo, the Soviet officer in command of the K-129’s sub fleet at that time. “The fact that the US managed to build a ship of 60,000-tons displacement, to install equipment to sustain such a load, to make provision of how to accommodate the submarine under the ship and finally to lift it up—it seemed to us something unreal, fantastic,” he told a Russian news program. “I can compare it with a mission to the moon in regard to technology and invested money. And another point—the ship was built in two years and the disinformation was organized outstandingly.”