Authors: Kenneth Sewell
So if there was no military intelligence value to the project that could not have been gained cheaper and faster by picking the wreck apart with existing technology, and the most important foreign affairs official in the Nixon team did not support it for geopolitical reasons, what esoteric purpose would raising the K-129 serve? Apparently the president himself, along with a handful of advisors, was obsessed with continuing Project Jennifer. Unless Nixon wanted the whole Soviet submarine physically brought to the surface, dismantled, and reassembled in some hidden place in the United States like a bizarre, giant trophy of war, there seemed to be no explanation for the expensive, high-risk venture.
Despite having achieved détente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, nobody in the Nixon administration counted these two Communist giants as new friends of the Americans.
If the DIA’s conclusions about a Soviet-attempted attack, based solely on photographs and scraps of tangible evidence, had proven useful in blackmailing the Soviets and inducing the Chinese to change their behavior, then the physical possession of the actual submarine would have been of even greater value in future dealings. The skillful dissemination of evidence of the K-129’s attempted nuclear attack might have already been instrumental in Nixon’s successful negotiations of the SALT I and ABM treaties with the Soviets, and in rapprochement with China. The Nixon strategists may have reasonably concluded there was yet more bargaining power to be gained by having the entire wreck in American custody.
Détente did nothing to lessen competition among the superpowers. In the early 1970s, the battle for the hearts and souls of mankind, particularly in the nonaligned nation-states, was more intense than ever. Brezhnev stepped up Soviet troublemaking after the accords had been reached by supporting Marxist revolutionary governments in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen. The Soviet and Chinese competition for leadership in the Third World intensified in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The United States was no less competitive in efforts to win these states to the Western camp.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in aid for programs that amounted to little more than public relations were being expended by the governments of the Eastern and Western blocs. In comparison to the price for humanitarian and military aid to woo the uncommitted states, the relatively low cost of a scheme such as Project Jennifer, which could potentially humiliate a competitor, must have seemed reasonable. Hard evidence that Brezhnev and the Soviet military had lost control of nuclear armaments would have threatened the Soviets’ coveted position as the peaceful proletariat protector of the Third World.
The most probable answer to the motivation for Project Jennifer is that some of Nixon’s key men knew the Soviets could later discount the claim of K-129’s rogue intent by charging that the
Halibut
evidence was forged. The photographs, electronic intelligence, and probability analysis either were circumstantial or could have been fabricated. At the time, many people in the world, no less in the United States, believed America had actually staged the Apollo moon landings in Hollywood movie studios or in the deserts of the Southwest.
A reassembled, 324-foot missile submarine would offer unassailable proof—a true smoking gun—with concrete evidence to be gleaned from the launch controls and missile guidance system. Data programmed into the computers could be physically retrieved to identify the target as Pearl Harbor. The remains of the exploded missile warhead and damage to missile tubes, conning tower, and hull would prove to anyone from the United Nations or any doubting foreign delegation that a Soviet submarine had destroyed itself in an attempted sneak attack. With tangible evidence to touch and see, no one could say the American case was purely circumstantial.
A number of key civilians in the Nixon administration were well aware of the U.S. embarrassment and propaganda value Khrushchev had squeezed from the display of the downed American U-2 spy plane a decade earlier. The display of a Soviet missile submarine that had attempted a sneak attack, rogue or not, would have had an even greater propaganda impact on world opinion.
For Nixon and a handful of others in the White House and the CIA, the half-billion-dollar Project Jennifer was indeed worth the cost and risk.
The project continued apace, hidden in the deepest secrecy of any endeavor since the Manhattan Project, which created the first atom bomb during World War II.
W
HEN MOST PEOPLE
think of Cold War spy paraphernalia, they imagine tiny gadgets such as lapel-pin cameras, fountain-pen guns, poison umbrella darts, and two-way wrist radios. But when the CIA was given the mission to raise the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from three miles deep in the Pacific Ocean, it ordered an oceangoing ship that weighed sixty-three thousand tons and was as long as a modern battleship. Like something in a sci-fi movie, the huge vessel had an arm that could reach the bottom of the ocean, with a giant, grasping claw to grab the wreckage and bring it to the surface.
The fantastic vessel at the center of the recovery operation had spider-like legs above and below sea surface. Its tallest point was a twenty-three-story (263-foot) derrick in the center of the deck. Unseen legs reached one hundred feet below the surface, with stern and bow thrusters to keep the craft stationary in all but the wildest seas.
Mission heart of the ship was a 199-foot-long by 75-foot-wide moon pool in the middle of the hull, with huge doors that opened the belly of the ship to the ocean. The moon pool was specifically designed for this mission. It was wide enough to accommodate two sections of the submarine’s 27-foot-wide hull at one time.
The 324-foot Soviet submarine had broken into sections when it hit the ocean floor. Since the designers of the recovery vessel had access to the photographs of the wreck taken by the
Halibut,
they knew exactly what the salvagers would be dealing with in terms of lengths, widths, and weights. Workmen were given the space to disassemble a section of the submarine in the moon pool and remove the pieces to adjoining storage bays in the hold of the ship, while the recovery team was piecing pipe together to lower the giant claw back down for another piece of the wreck.
The recovery operations centered in the ship’s moon pool—more or less out of sight—by dropping steel pipe from the derrick with the giant claw at the end, joint by joint, three miles down to the bottom of the sea. The steel talons of the claw were designed to close around the object to be retrieved and slowly hoist it to the surface. The claw was controlled from a CIA van which had been assembled onshore and loaded onto
Glomar Explorer
by crane. Technicians observed the operation on television monitors from inside the van. The supporting system and claw assembly, which was nicknamed Clementine, weighed more than six million pounds—three thousand tons. After being lowered over the broken sections of K-129 on the three-mile steel “string” of pipe, the claw could gently close over the hull and securely grasp it for its journey back into the moon pool.
The ship, built and sailed for that one mission, became famous or infamous, depending on one’s nationalistic point of view, as the
Hughes Glomar Explorer.
Despite the physical and financial size of the project, few people in Washington were aware of the Jennifer Project when it was launched in the early 1970s. The whole story of this operation is not known even today, three decades later. Many versions have been disseminated over the years since the venture was discovered by snooping news reporters in 1974.
The
Hughes Glomar Explorer,
a 618-foot, oceangoing behemoth, was named for the man who fronted the venture for the CIA—eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. He had a decades-long relationship with the U.S. military and the intelligence establishment.
Hughes Tool Company of Houston was chosen to manage the CIA project and subcontract all other phases of construction and management. The primary subcontractor was Global Marine, Inc., a world leader in building and operating ships mounted with marine drilling rigs. “Glomar” was the combination of the two words in the company title. The company operated another ship, remarkably similar to the
Glomar Explorer
but about two-thirds the length. That ship, the
Glomar Challenger,
had been operating all around the globe for years, in deep-sea drilling projects sponsored by a consortium of oceanographic institutions. Its primary mission was to take earth-crust samples beneath the sea for the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES).
A positioning system had been developed to enable a ship to hold a steady position on the surface, even in moderately rough seas, while a drill-pipe stem was lowered to the ocean floor to take corings. To maintain this stability, the ship’s computers received constant positioning data from sensors planted on the bottom of the sea. The sensors sent signals to the computer, which activated bow and stern thrusters, or propellers, that held the ship steady against the constantly moving current. This technology was copied in the larger sister ship,
Glomar Explorer.
On the ocean surface, the
Glomar Explorer
looked very much like a longer version of the
Glomar Challenger.
Any observer, especially one forced to remain some distance from the working boat, would see what appeared to be a huge floating oil derrick amidship of the boat. Everything else surrounding the towering derricks on both ships was a confusing jumble of specialized equipment designed to support the drilling or grappling operations.
With a reputation as one of the world’s leading deep-sea oil exploration and drilling companies, Global Marine was a logical choice to conceal the CIA’s ambitions, since it would appear that the new ship’s purpose was to extract minerals from the seabed. Howard Hughes’s companies were also in the offshore oil business, with operations all over the world. But in the case of the
Glomar Explorer,
the drilling technology had been adapted to retrieve booty much heavier than oil from the ocean floor.
To some in the know, the mission and the cost of Project Jennifer did not make sense. The Navy scientists who had earlier gathered most of the information of military value with the USS
Halibut
’s dive in 1968 saw no reason to investigate further the K-129 site.
Their arguments against the project carried little weight because, from the beginning, someone in the Nixon administration was determined to recover the sunken Soviet submarine. It was Nixon himself who ordered the CIA into the operation. And it was Nixon who demanded every possible means be used, with no expense spared, to raise the entire submarine. Even the top man in the CIA had initially been skeptical of the strange mission. CIA Director Richard Helms told the briefing officer, “You must be crazy,” when first presented with the plan.
Contracts were let in early 1970 to design and build the ocean salvage vessel. The gigantic project proceeded in all haste under a mandate from the Central Intelligence Agency to “protect sources and methods.”
After the CIA took control of the project, the Navy was gradually muscled aside, until finally only a few top admirals and civilian Department of Navy officials were still in the loop. But the project probably never would have gone beyond the talking stage were it not for one political appointee in the DOD who more or less hand-carried it through the red tape for his friend, the president. That man was Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, cofounder of the pioneering computer company Hewlett-Packard. Packard was one of Nixon’s first civilian appointees, and served in the subcabinet post for three years. One of his first assignments was approving Project Jennifer, which included Navy funding for a large part of the cost to build the
Glomar Explorer.
Years later, even after all the controversy, Packard told author William J. Broad, “The Cold War probably would have turned out as it did without that endeavor. But you never know.”
The CIA operation was on legal thin ice, even under American law—not to mention blatant violation of international maritime law. It was authorized by the National Security Council’s 10-2 rule of 1948, which permitted clandestine operations outside the purview of Congress. That rule allowed funding for “special operations, always provided they were secret, and sufficiently diminutive in size as to be plausibly denied by the government.”
The 10-2 authority existed long before Project Jennifer and was ideal for the Nixon administration’s geopolitical ambitions in the early 1970s. However, under no circumstances could Project Jennifer, with cost estimates as high as a half-billion dollars, have been considered “diminutive in size.”
Arguably, the whole black operation was illegal from the outset. The cost and details of the operation were always kept secret from Congress.
A final contract was signed between Hughes Tool Company and the U.S. government. A special Howard Hughes company called Summa Corporation was created to manage the project. Global Marine created a subsidiary, Global Marine Development, Inc., especially for the operation.
Secret subcontracts were let to a German bearings company and a number of top U.S. companies, including Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, Mechanics Research, Inc., Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., the National Steel and Shipbuilding Co., Western Gear, Minneapolis Honeywell, Houston Systems Manufacturing, General Electric, and Cosmodyne Corporation. Global Marine was in charge of the design and engineering of the
Glomar Explorer.
These companies all had experience working within the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, and several had direct experience with the CIA’s strange requests. The contractors and subcontractors were not told how their contributions fit into the bigger picture, or even how their products were to be used. It remained a need-to-know operation all the way to the White House.
The construction contract to build the
Glomar Explorer
was awarded to Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock, Chester, Pennsylvania, in April 1971.
To complete the project, one other significant piece of very large, very conspicuous equipment was required. The six-million-pound claw was so heavy and unwieldy that it could not be hoisted onto the ship after being specially tooled and assembled. So an enormous, submersible barge called Hughes Mining Barge (HMB-1) was built to house the assembly of the claw. While
Glomar Explorer
was under construction on the East Coast, the barge was being built at the Todd Shipyard in San Diego, under the direction of Lockheed Missiles & Space Company. The barge, which weighed forty-seven hundred tons, was 180 feet long and had a 70-foot-high arched, retractable roof. It was designed to carry the claw to the host ship. Once the two vessels met, HMB-1 submerged and maneuvered under the ship. The
Glomar
’s moon pool doors opened to the hovering barge and the HMB-1’s roof retracted. A pipe-stem shaft was lowered into the barge and the claw connected. The claw was lifted by the derrick into the moon pool of the ship, where it would await its mission.
The ship, the barge, the claw, and all the hundreds of special pieces of equipment needed for the operation were designed, engineered, and fabricated in 1971 and early 1972, while Nixon’s clandestine negotiations with the Soviets and the Chinese were moving ahead at a fast pace toward the major peace accords that would be signed in the spring of 1972.
The
Glomar Explorer
and the floating hangar HMB-1 were completed at the shipyards on the East and West coasts late in 1972. Sea trials for the vessels were conducted in February and March of the following year. In October 1973, the
Glomar Explorer
arrived at its new home port in Long Beach, California, where it was to be outfitted with all the special equipment needed for the mission to raise the Soviet submarine.
By then, the Watergate hearings, which had begun months before, were consuming the nation’s attention. The political whodunit playing out in the nation’s capital diverted investigative reporters from follow-up on the sightings of the odd ship and barge moving around ports on the California coast, and temporarily prevented probes into Project Jennifer.
Nevertheless, some newsmen began to hear rumors about the
Glomar Explorer
and its mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.
A smoke screen of secrecy had already been laid down by the CIA to protect the covert operation taking shape on the Pacific coast of the United States. One of the biggest cover-ups and disinformation campaigns in the espionage history of America had been launched in 1970, even as contracts for Project Jennifer were being let. As a result of this major cover-up operation planned by the CIA and the Nixon administration, the truth about the K-129 sinking was to remain tightly wrapped in that cloak of secrecy for more than a decade after the end of the Cold War. None of the documents have ever been declassified.
The motives for raising the obsolete submarine at the risk of creating an international furor were never explained because the questions were never asked at the time. The Watergate scandal became an unwitting contributor to the cover-up of the K-129 incident.
At first, the secrecy surrounding the sinking of the Soviet submarine was strictly in response to the practical need for maintaining national security at the height of the Cold War. The Americans did not want the Soviets to know how advanced their satellite and deep-ocean surveillance capabilities had become. And the U.S. Navy did not want to reveal that spy subs such as the
Halibut
even existed.
To safeguard that intelligence, the Navy planted the story that K-129 had been investigated by the surface ship
Mizar,
which had all the technology used by the
Halibut.
That cover story held firm from 1968 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.