by Josh Dean
There would be no book at all if not for two very important people: Daniel Greenberg, my agent, for selling it, and Jessica Renheim, my editor, for buying it. They are, individually and collectively, the best. Approximately 100 percent of people who heard about the idea while I was working on it said, “That should be a movie!” so hopefully by the time you read this that’s a real possibility. If so, it means that Michelle Kroes at CAA and Rick Jacobs at Circle of Confusion are working their magic.
Gillian Fassel, every writer’s frenemy, turned her red pen upon the manuscript and absolutely made it better while only slightly bruising my ego. Keith Schlegel, a retired English professor and family friend, corrected my comma abuses. Chuck Cannon, Dave Pasho, Steve Kemp, and Joe Houston all read drafts and helped me avoid embarrassing engineering and science mistakes. Probably I still screwed a few things up. That’s what the paperback is for!
I couldn’t do this job without my incredible wife, Gillian Telling, allowing me to take off and stalk retired spies. She is an excellent writer herself, as well as an excellent magazine editor (her full-time job), and—most of all—excellent mother to our two boys, Charlie and Nicky.
Finally, I want to say a few things about my dad, David Dean. I dedicated this book to him for a couple of reasons. He’s a retired history professor and an author himself, so he’s a big part of the reason I’m out here doing this. He always encouraged reading and education and pushed me to do things like internships even when I didn’t want to. He’s a kind, generous, and only occasionally foul-mouthed man who did a lot of the child-rearing in an era when that wasn’t very common for men. He’s also the only parent I have left. My mom, also a former professor and writer, died rather suddenly while I was working on my first book. A few months ago, we found out my dad—who’s run seventy marathons, biked across America three times, and hasn’t smoked a cigarette in his life—had lung cancer. It was shocking and scary and seemed for a little while like I might be out of parents by the time my second book was published. But a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic removed a lemon-size tumor in February and found that the cancer hadn’t spread. My dad will have four chemo treatments over a few months and then, with some luck, he’ll be back to normal, running, biking, drinking beer, and complaining about Indiana University basketball. I fully expect him to be around for the next few books.
A Note About Sources
This book is a work of nonfiction. I have made every effort to verify all statements of fact, and direct quotes come either from existing documentation—official government records, court transcripts, and previously published books and articles—or from interviews with surviving participants, who recalled specific conversations to me. I have attempted to locate a second source for all facts that came to me from interviews, but that wasn’t always possible, and this being a book about intelligence—a business that employs and relies upon some of the world’s best liars—it’s always possible that someone’s memory is a little off, or that a person has intentionally misled me. I don’t think that’s the case, but I feel it’s worth mentioning anyway.
No book of narrative nonfiction is possible without those works that came before it, and I am indebted to several in particular. The two most important are Project Azorian by Norman Polmar and Michael White, and The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation by David Sharp. Polmar is a naval historian, and his collaboration with White—a filmmaker who made an hour-long documentary in conjunction with the book—goes deep into the military and engineering specifics of this story, on both the Russian and American sides. Michael White’s accompanying film, also titled Project Azorian, is excellent, too, and includes beautiful computer-generated images of the various complex systems that made up the submarine recovery system on the Glomar Explorer. If you can’t quite picture Clementine and the heavy-lift system, watch White’s film. Actually, even if you can picture it, you should watch the film.
Dave Sharp was a key member of Azorian’s original CIA engineering team, and the head of recovery on the mission. His book is tremendous. It’s part memoir, part history, and is chockablock with anecdotes and insider recollections about life inside John Parangosky’s think tank. Sharp fought the CIA’s notorious Publications Review Board for years for the right to publish. That permission was finally granted in 2011, a year after the National Security Archive got the CIA to release its heavily redacted internal history of the Azorian mission planning, engineering, and security apparatus.
No single document was more important to me than this official Agency history, which originally appeared in the CIA’s classified journal, Studies in Intelligence. It was written by an unnamed Agency historian, based on interviews with Azorian officers (including, presumably, Mr. P) and the reams of official program material that are still locked away in a northern Virginia warehouse that I tried repeatedly, in vain, to get access to. I got as far as a meeting with a bureaucrat assigned to the office that weighs what remains classified versus what can be safely disseminated to journalists and FOIA cranks. Mostly he stared at me blankly and offered little hope when I pleaded for help. “Do you have any idea how much material there is for this one operation?” he asked. “Boxes.” He meant this as a dismissal, but it only egged me on. I’m still after those boxes.
Two other, much earlier Glomar Explorer books I found helpful were A Matter of Risk by Wayne “Cotton” Collier, and Clyde Burleson’s The Jennifer Project. These two were published long before any of the operation’s details were officially acknowledged, which explains why Burleson’s book used the wrong name for its title. Until very recently, Jennifer is what pretty much everyone called Project Azorian. Collier was hired by Global Marine to recruit the Explorer’s civilian crew, and I have no idea how he managed to write his somewhat myopic but very detailed account without going to jail. Roger Dunham’s Spy Sub was also invaluable. It is, ostensibly, a work of fiction about a secret special projects sub called the Viperfish. In reality, it’s a thinly veiled memoir of his time on the USS Halibut, focusing on the hunt for the K-129 wreck, and is a novel only because NCIS agents convinced Dunham that publishing a nonfiction account of this still-classified episode might land him in very hot water.
The heart and soul of this book, of course, are the humans who brought this incredible mission to life, and a surprising number of them were still alive to share their stories. They provided the best and most detail, by far, nearly all of it attributed and on the record—with only a few exceptions from retired spies. I’d be remiss if I didn’t single out the contributions of two deceased Azorian veterans who kept diaries that are invaluable artifacts, for me and for history. Manfred Krutein’s appears, in parts, in his fascinating, colorful immigrant memoir Amerika? America!, while John Rutten’s was found by his son, Rand, in a storage unit after his father’s death. Rand polished up the diary, submitted it to the CIA’s PRB, and then self-published the parts the agency didn’t redact as a book he titled DOMP.
You’ll notice this edition lacks notes. That’s because I’m trying something new. To avoid turning this book into, as my editor says, “a doorstopper,” I’m including just a selected bibliography and this note. Complete notes, with links to online sources wherever possible, are online on a website I set up for the book. This allows me to go into much more detail and to update the notes and longer bibliography as mistakes or omissions surface. I will also include story updates, some interview excerpts, and photos. If I get ambitious, there’ll be a blog. Check it out: www.thetakingofk129.com.
If you have a question about the source of a fact, or want to share additional stories for future editions, by all means drop me a line. I’m easy to find on all your major social media platforms (when in doubt, try @joshdean66), or you can e-mail me directly to a special account I set up for the express purpose of luring people out of the shadows, at [email protected]. You can also find me on Signal and WhatsApp, if end-to-end encryption puts you more at ease.
Selected Bibliography
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Books
Amel’ko, Admiral Nikolai. In the Interest of the Fleet and State. Moscow: Nauka, 2003.
Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
Bauer, Robert F., with F. Jay Schempf. Roughneckin’. Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2009.
Benford, Harry. Naval Architecture for Non-Naval Architects. Jersey City, NJ: Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 2006.
Broad, William J. The Universe Below. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Bucher, Lloyd M., USN, with Mark Rascovich. Bucher: My Story. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
Burleson, Clyde W. The Jennifer Project. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Burns, Thomas S. The Secret War for the Ocean Depths. New York: Rawson Associates Publishers, Inc., 1978.
Colby, William. Honorable Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
———. 30 Ans de C.I.A. Paris: Presse de la Renaissance, 1978.
Craven, John P. The Silent War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes. New York: Broadway Books, 1985. Digital edition.
Dunham, Roger C. Spy Sub. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996.
Dygalo, Viktor. A Rear Admiral’s Notes. Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2009.
Feldstein, Mark. Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010.
Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Ford, Harold R. William E. Colby as Director of Central Intelligence, 1973–1976. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1993; declassified 2011.
Gates, Robert M. From the Shadows. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Hack, Richard. Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters. Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2007.
Helvarg, David. Blue Frontier. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2001.
Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983.
Huchthausen, Peter A., and Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix. Hide and Seek. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Hutchinson, Robert. Jane’s Submarines: War Beneath the Waves from 1776 to the Present Day. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Johnson, Clarence L. “Kelly,” with Maggie Smith. Kelly: More than My Share of It All. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1985.
Krutein, Eva, and Manfred Krutein. Amerika? America!. Albuquerque, NM: Amador Press, 1997.
Mero, John L. The Mineral Resource of the Sea. Elsevier Oceanography Series 1. New York: Elsevier, 1965.
Podvig, Pavel. Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Polmar, Norman, and Michael White. Project Azorian. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010.
Reed, W. Craig. Red November. New York: William Morrow, 2010.
Rich, Ben R., and Leo Janos. Skunk Works. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.
Richelson, Jeffrey T. The US Intelligence Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012.
———. The Wizards of Langley. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002.
Riebling, Mark. Wedge. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Romney, Carl. Recollections. Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2012. Digital edition.
Ruffner, Kevin C., and the CIA History Staff. CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program. Cold War Records Series 4. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1995.
Rule, Bruce. Why the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) Was Lost: Death of a Submarine in the North Atlantic. Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2011.
Rutten, R. John, M.D. Deep Ocean Mining Project. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2012.
Sederberg, Arelo C. Hughesworld: The Strange Life and Death of an American Legend. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013.
Sewell, Kenneth, with Clint Richardson. Red Star Rogue. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
Sharp, David H. The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2012.
Sontag, Sherry, and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.
Spassky, I.D., ed. Istoriya Otechestvennogo Sudostroeniya [History of indigenous shipbuilding]. Vol. 5, 1946–1991. St. Petersburg: Sudostroenie, 1996.
Varner, Roy, and Wayne Collier. A Matter of Risk. New York: Random House, 1977.
Werth, Barry. 31 Days. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.
Woods, Randall B. Shadow Warrior. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
Articles
Aarons, Leroy F. “Glomar Sets Test Cruise.” Washington Post, April 10, 1975.
Alexin, V. “Better Late Than Never.” Independent Military Review, September 17, 1999. http://nvo.ng.ru/notes/1999-09-17/k-129.html. Article on the ceremony to honor the K-129 crew.
Baldwin, Jack O. “Secret Hughes Barge on Way to Catalina.” Independent (Long Beach, CA), January 9, 1974.
“Behind the Great Submarine Snatch.” Newsweek, December 6, 1976.
Belair, Felix, Jr. “S.E.C. Staff Finds Data About Glomar Misleading.” New York Times, April 1, 1975.
Benson, Bruce. “Hughes Mineral Ship’s at Lahaina.” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, August 17, 1974.
Boyarsky, Bill. “Why Editors Withheld Details on Sub.” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1975.
Broad, William. “Navy Has Long Had Secret Subs for Deep-Sea Spying, Experts Say.” New York Times, February 7, 1994.
———. “Russia Says U.S. Got Sub’s Atom Arms.” New York Times, June 20, 1993.
Chriss, Nicholas C., and Jerry Cohen. “‘Good Old Boys’ Raised Russian Sub.” Washington Post, April 8, 1975.
———. “Sub Recovery: Anatomy of a Secret Mission.” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1975.
“C.I.A. Asked Tax Assessor’s Aid on Ship.” New York Times, April 4, 1974.
“CIA’s Mission Impossible.” Newsweek, March 31, 1975.
“CIA Plan Disclosed in Glomar Incident.” New York Times, October 26, 1977.
“CIA Rebuffs Request in Trial for Data on a Hughes Burglary.” New York Times, January 6, 1976.
Claiborne, William, and George Lardner, Jr. “Colby Called Glomar Case ‘Weirdest Conspiracy.’” Washington Post, November 5, 1977.
Clarity, James F. “Soviet Is Silent on Sub Salvaging.” New York Times, March 20, 1975.
Cohen, Fritzi. “The Unanswered Questions of the Glomar Explorer.” Covert Action, no. 9 (June 1980).
Cohen, Jerry, and George Reasons. “CIA Recovers Part of Russian Sub.” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1975.
Crewdson, John M. “‘CIA Men’ Sought Tax Break on Glomar.” Washington Star, June 8, 1975.
Eccles, Henry E., Rear Admiral, US Navy (Ret.). “The Russian Maritime Threat.” Naval War College Review (June 1969).
“Engineering for Azorian.” Studies in Intelligence 23, no. 2 (Summer 1979).
Farr, William. “Mystery of Hughes’ Secret Memo Solved.” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1975.
Fazio, Marlene. “Mining Ship Is Launched.” Delaware County Daily Times, November 6, 1972.
Foley, Charles. “Hughes Mining Ocean Floor, Report Claims.” London Observer, November 5, 1973.
———. “Hughes Taking Plunge to Reap Ocean’s Riches.” London Observer, October 31, 1972.
Fountain, Henry. “Dr. Donald D. Flickinger, 89, a Pioneer in Space Medicine.” New York Times, March 9, 1997.
“The Great Submarine Snatch.” Time, March 31, 1975.
Hersh, Seymour. “C.I.A. Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles.” New York T
imes, March 19, 1975.
———. “Human Error Is Cited in ’74 Glomar Failure.” New York Times, December 9, 1976.
———. “Participant Tells of C.I.A. Ruse to Hide Glomar Project.” New York Times, December 10, 1976.
Horrock, Nicholas M. “CIA Ends Plan to Raise Soviet Sub.” New York Times, January 14, 1976.
———. “CIA Reported Pressing S.E.C. to Curb Global Marine Inquiry.” April 27, 1975.
Howard, John, Lt. “Fixed Sonar Systems: The History and Future of the Underwater Silent Sentinel.” Submarine Review (April 2011).
“Hughes Glomar Explorer Begins Sea Tests of Mining Systems.” Ocean Industry, March 1974.
“Hughes Mystery Barge Slips Down the Coast.” Santa Cruz Sentinel (Santa Cruz, CA), January 8, 1974.
“In Memoriam: John Parangosky, National Reconnaissance Pioneer.” National Reconnaissance, date unknown.
“John Parangosky.” Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame. http://www.nvahof.org/hof/hof-2014/john-parangosky/.
Lardner, George, Jr. “CIA Covert Action Defended.” Washington Post, April 8, 1975.
———. “Hughes Ship Tax Doubled by California.” Washington Post, June 4, 1975.
———. “SEC Reaches a Truce on CIA Projects.” Washington Post, April 9, 1975.
Lardner, George, Jr., and William Claiborne. “CIA’s Glomar ‘Game Plan.’” Washington Post, October 23, 1977.
Latham, Aaron. “How Glomar Really Surfaced.” New York, April 7, 1975.
Lewis, John, Colonel, US Army. “The Deep Sea Resources.” Naval War College Review (June 1969).
Lynch, Mark H. “FOIA and the CIA.” Center for National Security Studies. First Principles 9 (September–October 1983).
Martin, Douglas. “Jack Anderson, Investigative Journalist Who Angered the Powerful, Dies at 83.” New York Times, December 18, 2005.
“Mining Sailors Heading for Ocean Depths.” High Gear, no. 1 (1978).
