Authors: Kenneth Sewell
Compromises were reached in the Kremlin and, for the first time, the losers in the struggle were not purged. But their powers were strictly curtailed. Suslov was relegated to a second-tier post. Representatives from each camp were placed in positions to checkmate the other. For all practical purposes, the government was paralyzed.
Without further ado, Suslov withdrew his attacks against Brezhnev in the Communist Party plenum. The all-powerful KGB, also uncharacteristically, took its loss of prestige and control meekly. Some extremely damning piece of evidence would have been required for Brezhnev’s sudden success in smashing the opposition within the party and the Politburo. A copy of the U.S. intelligence assessment of a rogue submarine attack could well have been the instrument that ended the so-called Moscow Mini Crisis, and shifted power to the Soviet military and a more moderate group of leaders in the Kremlin.
President Nixon did not rely solely on the intimidating evidence from the K-129 incident to bully, blackmail, and coerce changes from the Soviet and Chinese Communists. In late 1969, he launched what has recently been revealed in declassified documents as the Nixon “madman strategy.”
This astounding tactic was apparently a deliberate attempt by the Nixon administration to make adversaries believe they were dealing with an irrational American president with his finger on the doomsday button. The only logical reason for such strange behavior in dealing with deadly weapons in a tense world would have been a psychological warfare plan aimed at frightening the Russians into making concessions in the Vietnam War and the long-stalled arms control negotiations. One of Nixon’s first acts under the madman strategy was to place all military forces of the United States on full nuclear alert in October 1969.
Initiation of this madman strategy may have been an early reaction to Nixon’s learning about the K-129 incident, because the first sign of an aggressive new policy came when Nixon ordered a massive increase in surveillance of all Soviet ships, including submarines, in the Atlantic and Pacific. Navy submarine hunters increased aerial cover of Soviet naval maneuvers, and American submarines and surface antisubmarine warfare ships more doggedly tailed Soviet vessels. Naval intelligence activities were stepped up to a near-wartime level.
Next, Nixon ordered dangerously provocative strategic aircraft maneuvers and sudden, periodic blackouts of all Allied military communications. Soviet spies may well have interpreted these strange maneuvers as preparations for an attack. It was a dangerous cat-and-mouse game.
The war in Vietnam was still raging, and Nixon took his aggressive policy into that theater of operations, even though the United States did not directly face the Soviets there. He ordered seemingly irrational patterns of military action in Vietnam, which included abruptly increased bombing raids into Cambodia and Laos, followed by unexplained pauses in the bombings. He ordered several purposeless sea raids on North Vietnamese territory. It was a bag of dirty tricks designed to convince an already jittery enemy that they faced a maniac in the new American president.
The American people were kept as much in the dark about this saber-rattling strategy as they were about the conclusions drawn regarding the Soviet submarine’s attempted attack on Hawaii. The government’s probability analysis on the K-129 had to be kept from the public, because revealing such a doomsday scenario would have dire consequences for both the nation’s economy and its security. Even a hint at how close America came to a catastrophic nuclear attack on one of its cities would have panicked the public and sent the nation into a new frenzy of bomb-shelter building. The Cuban Missile Crisis had had a similar effect a few years earlier. The incident off Hawaii brought the public to within seconds of a nuclear attack. While the Cuban crisis was played out in the media, the attack on Pearl Harbor and Honolulu would have come without warning.
The incident involving the Soviet submarine was most likely used successfully during the early days of the Nixon administration as both carrot and stick to begin changing the recalcitrant conduct of America’s two most powerful enemies. Had the K-129 story ended there, the relic submarine would already have had a significant impact on the outcome of the Cold War.
But Nixon and his advisors had further use for the wreck lying three miles down in the Pacific, northwest of Hawaii.
In January 1969, Dr. John Craven had taken an unpaid leave of absence from his position as chief scientist at the Navy’s Special Projects Office to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The following December he received a call from the Navy, asking him to serve on the DIA Scientific Advisory Board. Upon returning to the agency as a consultant, he learned that, under the new administration, much of the submarine intelligence program had been taken over by the Central Intelligence Agency. Both the Navy and the DIA were unhappy about the arrangement.
It was in this rancorous atmosphere that Dr. Craven and others in the Navy’s underseas intelligence community learned of one of the strangest projects in the history of American intelligence.
At the height of Kissinger’s back-channel diplomacy with the Soviets and Chinese, and when Nixon was aggressively employing his madman antics, an even stranger scheme emerged from the White House. The Central Intelligence Agency was tasked with recovering the entire K-129 wreck from the bottom of the ocean.
The clandestine Forty Committee authorized a fantastic operation to recover the Soviet submarine on October 20, 1969. Committees such as this one had been formed to supervise covert operations for every president since Dwight Eisenhower. Under Nixon, the committee answered directly to Kissinger in his role as national security advisor. The Forty Committee included high-level assistants from Department of State, Department of Defense, CIA, DIA, and NSC.
In this case, the Forty Committee approved an operation for the CIA to physically recover the wrecked K-129. The operation, which came to be known as Project Jennifer, required the construction of a special-purpose spy ship called the
Glomar Explorer.
To accomplish the huge project Nixon removed the Navy from the K-129 loop, except on a need-to-know basis. He turned the project over to a special working group in the Central Intelligence Agency. What had been, until then, primarily a military intelligence project led by the DIA became a clandestine political operation run by the CIA and the White House. As with many CIA covert operations during that period of the Cold War, bitter interservice rivalries led to leaks of information. But, overall, the operation was kept closely guarded within a small group of insiders.
Once the project was approved, Nixon’s men called on a civilian who was no stranger to the United States government’s weird world of espionage to front the mission. The eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, using the cover of one of his oil companies, was commissioned by the CIA to build and operate a fantastical boat for an almost science-fiction-type covert operation.
T
HE PROJECT TO RAISE THE
S
OVIET SUBMARINE
from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean quickly became the “CIA’s most expensive and ambitious operation of all time.” Over the lifetime of the operation, it would go through several phases and have a number of code names, but the name that stuck was Project Jennifer.
Rapidly improving relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China would seem to have overtaken the need for such a dramatic and large-scale covert operation. By the time the CIA clandestine mission to retrieve K-129 was fully underway, Kissinger’s back-channel diplomacy had cracked open the door to Beijing and Moscow.
The K-129 incident may have provided some of the impetus for these world-changing geopolitical events, but the larger strategy of triangulation and brinkmanship was the real engine driving the Nixon administration’s breathtaking foreign policy successes.
On another front, the Vietnam War, Nixon also seemed to be making progress, after deliberate escalation in 1969. Nixon had ordered a wild dash by American troops into Cambodia in May 1969, opening a new war front in the face of public outrage in the United States. The eight-week Cambodian incursion succeeded in destroying the supply bases along the southern leg of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which drastically curtailed the fighting for the next two years. The relative lull in combat was long enough to set in motion the beginning of an orderly withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.
The first major Nixon foreign policy breakthrough came, not in Soviet-American relations or in the Vietnam War, but with the People’s Republic of China. Kissinger, whose title was still national security advisor to the president, made an unannounced visit to China in July 1971. The topics covered in that first meeting in China are still classified. However, because of the timing of the meeting, there is reason to suspect that Kissinger or his aides capitalized on the earlier leaks of intelligence about the K-129.
The delegation also wanted the Chinese leadership to know that the Nixon administration was concerned about the prospect of a full-scale Sino-Soviet war breaking out. Chinese and Soviet armies were involved in frequent skirmishes all along their common border. More ominously, following a large battle on the Ussuri River in which several hundred soldiers and militiamen from both sides were killed, the Soviets had threatened to use nuclear force against China.
Kissinger used the border conflict between the Communist states as leverage. The transcript from a meeting between Chairman Mao and Kissinger flatly stated that the Americans favored China. Kissinger told the Chinese tyrant that the entire world would suffer if the Soviets successfully invaded China. “It would dislocate the security of all other countries and will lead to our own isolation,” Kissinger told Mao. He said the United States did not want to see China defeated, because it would elevate the Soviet Union to the most powerful nation on earth, ruling a territory astride Europe and Asia. At the very time Kissinger was expressing concern over the destruction of the Communist states from a Sino-Soviet war, one of his working groups was planning just that fate for both. The Forty Committee, which Kissinger chaired, was actively issuing mandates to the CIA to “create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism, impair relations between the USSR and Communist China and between them and their satellites, complicate control within the USSR, Communist China and their satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc.”
The strategy of intrigue seemed to have produced a big payoff for Nixon’s foreign policy goals. Without explanation, the Cold War suddenly began to thaw, despite the fact that both the Soviet Union and Communist China were then under the leadership of hard-liners.
The role of the K-129 incident as a wedge in these early talks has never been publicly revealed. But it is reasonable to assume that Kissinger benefited from the interpretation that the Soviet plot, rogue or not, intended to blame the attack on China’s Golf I submarine. The U.S. intelligence material turned over to the Chinese would not have emphasized a conclusion that K-129 was possibly a rogue submarine rather than an authorized, albeit secret, Soviet mission. A suspicious intriguer such as Mao, who also held so much personal animosity toward the Soviet leadership, would have been impressed by details of such a sinister plot.
Many of the groundbreaking conversations between Chinese officials and Kissinger’s delegation remain classified. However, a large number of the official transcripts of Kissinger’s visits with Chou En-lai and Mao were declassified in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. No official document has yet been declassified that indicates Kissinger delivered the message of Soviet perfidy about the rogue submarine to the Chinese.
Secret meetings between Americans and Chinese leaders continued throughout 1971. By early 1972, a breakthrough was achieved in a relationship that had seen America and China in a virtual state of undeclared war since 1949, and a real war on the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. U.S.-China rapprochement was concluded in early 1972, and a victorious President Nixon went to China.
Despite the continuation of openly hostile rhetoric between the Americans and the Soviets, there was also an inexplicable cooling-off period in the Cold War at about the same time. Something had scared the bellicose Soviets back to the bargaining table. After being stalled for years, the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly came to terms on a strategic arms limitation treaty. Once again, timing coincided with frenzied American efforts to exploit the K-129 wreck. And once again, nothing about a subject of such vital interest to the Soviets is mentioned in any of the newly declassified transcripts of secret meetings between Kissinger and the Russians. However, it should be remembered that major international negotiations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Red China were rapidly coming to successful conclusion during this brief period in the Cold War.
SALT I was signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow on May 26, 1972. Shortly afterward, a mutually acceptable antiballistic missile accord was reached, which offered an imaginary degree of protection for some American and Russian cities. Later, the U.S. Congress ordered an end to the Johnson administration’s Sentinel ABM deployments.
A flurry of other agreements quickly followed these early geopolitical breakthroughs. Nixon and Brezhnev inked more treaties in 1972 than all the presidents of the two belligerent states had signed in the previous fifty-year history of Soviet-American relations.
Despite his remarkable international successes, Nixon doggedly pursued the fantastic scheme to raise the sunken Soviet submarine, and for an unreasonably high price, at a time when U.S. military budgets were astronomical. What could possibly have compelled the Nixon administration to pursue a project that, if discovered, could have derailed Soviet-American détente, and the Salt I and ABM treaties? Why was the physical recovery of an old-type Soviet submarine so important?
After the project was finally revealed, there was much speculation in the media and government circles about why the CIA and Nixon undertook Project Jennifer in the first place. Guesses ranged from the standard canard that the intelligence to be gained was essential for national security, to the trite explanation that Nixon designed the project as a “pork barrel” payback to his campaign contributors. Neither of these explanations seems supportable, considering the extraordinary high cost and high risk involved.
The most expensive CIA operation in history, Project Jennifer became one of the single highest priorities in the Nixon years. Like every other detail of the project, the official price tag was, and remains, top-secret. Funds were drawn by the CIA from the Navy’s covert deep-sea intelligence budget, and additional funding was hidden throughout the “black ops” budgets of the spy agency. Estimated costs range widely, from a high of $550 million reported in
Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia,
to the much lower and less precise estimate “in excess of $200 million,” cited in a Federation of American Scientists intelligence report. Even at the low end of these estimates, the cost of the project was enormous for that period, especially since the American taxpayers were already groaning under the burdens of the six-year-long Vietnam War. The most commonly quoted cost estimate appearing in the national media for Project Jennifer was $500 million. That was almost enough money to build four nuclear-powered submarines at the 1970 cost of approximately $130 million per boat.
It is known that the single costliest piece of hardware for the project was the special supership constructed to serve as the platform for raising the K-129.
“The ship took five years to build…on time and under budget [$70 million],” reported author Mark Riebling in
WEDGE: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA.
Nixon and the CIA apparently believed the clandestine project was worth the cost and risks, because they doggedly pursued it, in the face of considerable disagreement. Knowledgeable intelligence experts from that era argued that any military secrets the older-style submarine might yield could be gained by other means, more cheaply and much more quickly.
The USS
Halibut
had already exploited the wreck for many of the military and technical secrets, at the very least exhaustively filming much of the boat and probably extracting some items as well. Despite the age of the submarine, its missile and communications systems were still of interest to the U.S. Navy. Some of the secrets the Navy wanted to harvest from the submarine were the Serb ballistic missiles and guidance systems, the nuclear-tipped torpedoes, code machines and codebooks, the internal guidance and navigational systems, the radio equipment, samples of the submarine’s plate welds, mechanical parts, official trip logs, and personal letters of the crew. Most valuable on this shopping list were the nuclear missiles and the code machines and codebooks. This list of military secrets, however, did not seem to justify a $500-million program to raise the entire submarine.
The U.S. Navy, through its underseas intelligence-gathering program, already had the ability, or was in the process of developing the technology, to recover much of this trove from the seabed. For some time the Navy had been scouring the bottom of the seas, locating and recovering Soviet rocket parts, including heavy sections of missile reentry vehicles. First-generation robots were already in use by the USS
Halibut
and surface ships such as the
Mizar.
Cable-controlled underwater recovery vehicles (CURV) that could grapple or snare were lowered to the sea floor to bring large objects into the bays of mother ships.
Some items may have been lifted from the K-129 wreck using this technology. Dr. Craven, the Navy scientist in charge of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, testified before the United States Senate that the
Halibut
had already used “investigative equipments” for “optimum recovery” from the wreck before the CIA entered the picture. In 1966, the navy’s
Mizar
employed a robot to pick up a hydrogen bomb from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The bomb had fallen into deep water after the midair collision of a B-52 and a refueling tanker off the coast of Palomares, Spain.
Even if existing equipment was not yet available to extract and raise one of K-129’s Serb missiles, special deep-diving robots to do such a chore could certainly have been built for less money, in less time, than the special recovery ship that was central to Project Jennifer’s scheme to raise the whole submarine.
There is a well-established record that the U.S. Navy did not believe the recovery mission was worth the enormous cost, and certainly not if the Navy’s budgets for underseas intelligence programs were to be raided to pay for the CIA project.
The Navy brass were not the only naysayers. Kissinger expressed doubts about the risk-benefit ratio of such a scheme. The danger of upsetting precariously balanced agreements by public disclosure of an American attempt to steal the Soviets’ submarine hardly seemed worth further risks.
The Soviets would have seen an American effort to seize their wrecked submarine as an act of aggression during a time of peace. If the Soviets learned of the attempt, the possibility of a confrontation in international waters loomed large. Kissinger feared the project would derail détente in its delicate stage of infancy, and hamper other secret negotiations to end the Vietnam War. The carefully crafted SALT I and ABM treaties could have also been jeopardized.
Finally, the charge that Nixon may have undertaken the expensive project simply to reward political patrons with huge, under-the-table contracts paid for with black operations money can be easily refuted. The speculation that Project Jennifer was a giant boondoggle with the purpose of repaying West Coast campaign contributors does not seem likely when the contractors for various parts of the project are examined. The largest single expenditure—$70 million for the construction of the ship—was paid to an East Coast shipbuilding consortium. The subcontracts for the various complicated machinery, parts, and equipment for the boat were scattered among American and European companies.
There appeared to be little opportunity for patronage in the project. Nixon would more likely have gained favor with his supporters in the military defense industry by allowing the worthless Sentinel ABM shield project started by his predecessor to be fully deployed. There was almost twice as much budget for that massive missile defense project as there was in Project Jennifer.