Authors: Kenneth Sewell
The Nixon assignment to the CIA to raise the submarine set into motion an even greater campaign of disinformation. As with the project itself, nobody has explained why such a major, long-term cover-up was required.
Nixon’s purpose for spending $500 million for the recovery of the K-129 notwithstanding, the Jennifer Project was, from the very beginning, a calculated exercise in deliberate duplicity, even within the U.S. government. Once the CIA took over, the project was wrapped in a fabricated story as elaborate as the fantastic equipment being built to raise the submarine.
A ship of the size and unusual superstructure of
Glomar Explorer
could not be built at any shipyard in America without attracting attention. For that reason, the billionaire Howard Hughes’s name and reputation became an integral part of the operation. Everyone knew the Hughes Tool Company and other Hughes enterprises had served as fronts for covert government projects since the beginning of the Cold War. His companies were also legitimate leaders in the field of offshore oil exploration and development. And Hughes was known for his eccentric gambles long before the CIA drafted him for its cover story. Who would think this venture any stranger than the rest?
Howard Hughes’s company took over the management of the cover story and issued elaborate press releases. Spokesmen held press conferences about the vessel being built at the Chester, Pennsylvania, shipyards near Philadelphia, and Hughes’s Summa Corporation, which controlled the project, announced it was going into deep-ocean mining on a grand scale.
The corporation’s ostensible purpose was to begin the underseas mining of so-called “black pearls,” ore-rich nodules, primarily manganese, found throughout the world’s deepest oceans. It apparently never occurred to anyone that there was no shortage of manganese and other ores available for mining on the earth’s surface, at far less cost than a deep-sea operation.
The deep-sea mining cover story set off a frantic scramble to open the world’s oceans to exploitation and caused a tidal wave of events that roiled the seas well into the 1990s. The bogus CIA story indirectly led to the ultimate passage of the United Nations’ Law of the Seas Treaty. Nations of the world frantically declared two-hundred-mile exclusive zones to protect their waters from being exploited by private mining corporations. Shortly after Howard Hughes’s company announced it was going to use the covert CIA boat for a giant mining venture, a dozen energy and mineral companies, including a number in the Fortune 500, went into the ocean-mining business.
Investigative journalist, author, and documentary producer David Helvarg said the
Glomar Explorer
had another significant, unintended consequence.
“If the opening of America’s western frontier can be traced back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806, the declaration of America’s Blue Frontier can be traced to a 1972 Central Intelligence Agency cover story,” Helvarg opined in the opening sentence of his authoritative environmental book,
Blue Frontier.
The CIA quietly sat back and let arguments rage over who could claim the rights to the world’s ocean-floor minerals. At the time, however, the unasked, real question concerned the legality of salvaging another country’s sunken ship in international waters, without the owner nation’s knowledge or permission. Since America planned to do just that, the ocean-mining story was simply a massive distraction.
While the cover story was being spun throughout the media world to hide the real purpose of
Glomar Explorer,
the CIA was taking great pains to protect other operational aspects of Project Jennifer. The Agency established headquarters for the operation in a seedy office building in the San Fernando Valley near the Los Angeles International Airport. The Summa Corporation also had offices in the building, but they were separate from the CIA’s operations center on the sixth floor. The CIA set up a series of safe houses in apartments near the main office, and other blinds were established in nearby commercial buildings. There were seventy-five people working in the project headquarters, only about one-quarter of whom knew the true purpose of the operation. The rest of the employees thought they were recruiting seamen to handle the ship, oilfield drillers to string the pipes, crane operators to run the derrick engines, and other personnel required for a unique, deep-ocean, commercial mining venture.
The career CIA agents and a small group of contractors who knew what they were really doing wore disguises. They were issued fake ID cards and given elaborately colorful biographies. A host of spies became mining engineers; intelligence analysts became oceanographers. Everyone in the know was given a legend.
After
Glomar Explorer
arrived at the nearby port of Long Beach, no recognizable government official was allowed to visit the ship. Seamen were recruited from West Coast port facilities, carefully screened, and required to sign oaths of secrecy before being told about the purpose of the operation. Oil field equipment riggers, roustabouts, and roughnecks were recruited by agents scouring the Gulf Coast towns that served as ports for commercial offshore drilling operations.
Offshore oil drillers are a breed unto themselves, known as the toughest, most close-knit and closemouthed men in the dangerous business of finding and bringing in oil wells. The men hired for this project were paid considerably more than they normally earned in that already high-paying dangerous trade. These oil workers, too, were carefully picked, had their backgrounds screened, and were then sworn to secrecy.
One of the roughnecks hired for the project answered the questions posed by a quizzical newsman years later:
“They told us they [the secrecy oaths] were the same kind of documents Daniel Ellsberg [former Defense Department employee who was prosecuted for leaking the Pentagon Papers] had signed.” The implication was that to talk about any aspect of the project would subject the participant to criminal prosecution.
When the operating crew of about two hundred men was finally assembled, they were put through a crash training course at a contractor’s facility in Redwood City, California. Some of this group would be washed out before the mission began. To their surprise, a complete mockup of a Soviet Golf submarine was located in a hangar there. They were trained to dismantle the ship and look for the special equipment, parts, and pieces to be retrieved from the wreck. They were taught how to handle radioactive material and work with contaminated scrap. They even learned a smattering of Russian, to be able to identify Cyrillic writing on various pieces they might discover from the wreck.
The CIA’s cover story about the deep-sea mining operation was so complete that agents secured tons of manganese nodules, similar to the so-called black pearls the
Glomar
was supposedly going to mine. The mineral-laden nuggets had been dredged up off the coast of Mexico to use as samples of the ore to be sought. These gnarled, potato-size nodules were given to interviewees for the Project Jennifer jobs to show off to friends and relatives.
In total, Project Jennifer required more than seven thousand men and women at various stages of the project, working for government agencies and contractors, and actually serving aboard the ship. All were either sworn to secrecy or allowed to learn only the smallest part of the operation, as their particular assignment required. Multiply the people working directly and indirectly on Project Jennifer by the friends and relatives in their immediate circles, and the number of people who knew small or large secrets about K-129 soars. Before the project was completed, tens of thousands of Americans were involved, or knew someone involved, in the big CIA project. Even then, very few knew the truth about it.
Considering the massive size of the strange ship and barge, the huge expenditure of taxpayer money, the thousands of people involved, and the scrutiny of the Nixon administration by the news media and Congress during that period, it seems nothing short of amazing that the cover story held together as long as it did. Even thirty years later, there have been no truthful, firsthand accounts published in the media or aired in documentaries regarding the extraordinary operation.
T
HE
U.S. N
AVY WAS SHUT OUT
of day-to-day participation in the Jennifer Project by the Central Intelligence Agency. But the spies had to call on the sailors again to find the wreckage. Before
Glomar Explorer
could be dispatched to the area of the Pacific where K-129 lay buried three miles deep, the location had to be pinpointed. The job could be done only with another clandestine dive by one of the Navy’s special spy submarines. The USS
Seawolf
(SSN 575) was dispatched to plot the wreckage field, and set out electronic devices to guide the surface ship to the exact location.
Seawolf
was assigned to the Navy’s Submarine Development Group One (SUBDEVGRU ONE), a secretive organization created in 1967 to conduct deep-ocean espionage against the Soviet Union.
Relocating and marking the wreckage of the Soviet submarine was the
Seawolf
’s first mission as a special operations boat, following its conversion from a nuclear-powered attack submarine at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
By this time in 1974, the Soviet missile carrier K-129 had been on the ocean floor for more than six years.
Ironically, the USS
Halibut,
which had originally located K-129 in the summer after it sank on March 7, 1968, was not available for the follow-up assignment, because it was prowling the waters around the doomed Soviet submarine’s original home port on another covert mission. In late June 1974, when Project Jennifer was finally ready to execute the long-delayed recovery operation, the
Halibut
was tapping the underwater communications cables between Rybachiy Naval Base at Petropavlovsk and Soviet Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. This was the very cable that K-129’s deputy commander, Captain Second Rank Alexander Zhuravin, had used in 1968 to notify his wife Irina that his submarine had returned from another patrol.
The Navy was indispensable to this phase of the project because, at the time, it possessed the only sophisticated equipment in the world capable of the particular type of deep-sea exploration needed for the mission. In the 1960s, the Navy’s Underwater Systems Center had developed the means to guide blind submarines to locations where objects of interest—such as underseas communications cables or Soviet missile parts—lay on the bottom of the sea.
When finding such lost or hidden objects, submarines from SUBDEVGRU ONE planted signaling devices called transponders on the ocean floor to provide precise directions for subsequent trips. Specialized vessels could then return to the sites and lower cameras or retrieval tools on towed robots, or even human divers, to exploit the objects. In very deep water, the transponders provided steady signals so the mother ship was able to maintain a fixed position while working for long periods.
A transponder placed on the ocean floor was activated by a signal from the search vessel using another device called a transducer. The transponder could only be triggered by a coded signal on a selected frequency; any other ship that might be searching for the object would be unable to intercept or eavesdrop on the signal. In this case, transponders were planted by
Seawolf
in each of the areas where large sections of K-129 lay. When the
Glomar Explorer
neared the site, transducers on that ship sent signals that activated these transponders so the search vessel could home in on the site.
The target was difficult to find, even though the
Halibut
had made detailed charts of the location after finding the wreckage in the summer of 1968. The debris field was located in a hundred-mile-wide, irregular plain littered with coral and lava mounds. It was located about seventy miles in a diagonal, northerly direction from the Necker and Nihoa islets and subterranean atolls of the Hawaiian Leeward Islands. There, the ocean floor was anything but smooth.
On Independence Day 1974, the sixty-three-thousand-ton
Glomar Explorer
was guided smoothly by the electronics to the site above the wreckage. Weather for the recovery was perfect. The special CIA ship was immediately able to begin an operation that James Clay Moltz, research professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, has described as the “granddaddy” of all deep-sea recovery attempts.
The large black-and-white ship with a distinctive three-story-high derrick could not be missed by any spying Soviet trawler or spy submarine. The CIA hoped its well-circulated cover story that
Glomar Explorer
was on a quest for manganese ore nodules would divert attention from the ship’s real mission. Even if a snooping Soviet trawler did approach the ship closely enough to watch its activities, very little could be seen. Most of the tasks were performed behind the high walls of the sixty-five-foot-deep moon pool, out of sight of prying eyes.
The
Glomar Explorer,
with an eclectic working crew of about two hundred—including drillers, mechanical engineers, mechanics, welders, roustabouts, sailors, scientists, electronics technicians, cooks, and spies—was ready for business as soon as it arrived on the site.
The recovery operation was only slightly different from a deep-sea drilling operation. Instead of a drill at the end of the string of pipe, the
Glomar Explorer
had a giant grasping claw. This did not lessen the need to keep the ship stationary.
Fortunately, during its entire time over the wreck site, the
Glomar Explorer
encountered ideally calm seas. Planners had loaded the ship with the latest meteorological forecasting gear, to make sure there were no sudden surprises from the weather. A surge in seas or heavy wave action caused by a sudden squall could have caused considerable damage at certain stages of the operation. However, once the pipe was strung beneath the ship with the claw attached, the long stem reaching into the depths actually helped to stabilize the ship, serving the function of a heavy, extended keel.
Offshore oil drillers are adept at stringing long lines of pipe dangling from platforms above open water. The techniques used on
Glomar Explorer
were basically the same as those used in the oil industry. Cannon-barrel-quality steel was used in the pipe and each section measured sixty feet in length. The pipe for the string measured from twelve to seventeen inches in outside diameter, with the thicker pipe added last, to provide extra strength closest to the ship, where the weight was the greatest.
The giant claw with its huge supporting frame was connected to the first length of pipe to be lowered. When the first few sections of pipe had been connected to the claw and hung below the derrick, the ensemble was held firmly by a giant brake mounted at the base of the derrick. The moon pool doors were then opened to the ocean. Slowly, the claw was lowered into the water to begin its three-mile journey into the depths.
One by one, each section of pipe was connected, with each new piece of pipe gradually lowering the whole rig, one sixty-foot section at a time. The next piece of pipe was hoisted from storage by a crane, pulled into place up the derrick and connected to the preceding piece of pipe. Over time, the weight grew, and workers had to constantly cool and lubricate the braking device.
Eventually the entire, three-mile-long string holding the claw was lowered directly above the first section of the submarine to be recovered. The operators aboard ship maneuvered the frame with the claw into place with the jaws open. The final mating of the claw and the submarine hull was accomplished using hydraulic thrusters on the claw frame. The operators had a perfect view of the operation via television cameras, also mounted on the frame.
Direct television lines and the hydraulic cables controlling the claw and frame were carried to the site inside the pipe string. Workers had inserted these cables into the hollow pipes from large spools mounted under the derrick on the ship as each pipe section was fitted.
Once positioned exactly above a piece of the submarine’s broken hull, the talons were slowly dropped the last few feet over the prey and gently closed around the wreckage.
To bring the prize to the surface, the pipe-stringing procedure was reversed. The crew on the
Glomar Explorer
removed one section of pipe at a time, as powerful diesel engines huffed and puffed, straining to raise a section of the submarine held firmly in the claw at the end of the pipe string.
When the claw holding a section of the submarine arrived beneath the ship, the operation paused while divers inspected the pieces of wreckage to make sure everything would fit easily into the moon pool. Finally, the derrick hoisted the last section of pipe. The claw with its burden was pulled inside the ship, and the moon pool doors closed. Then the claw was opened, releasing the section of submarine to rest on the floor while water was pumped out of the moon pool.
Workmen swarmed over the wreck like furious ants scavenging an insect carcass. The wreckage was connected by steel cable to cranes mounted at each end of the moon pool. The tangles of steel hull, wires, and pipes that had been compartments of the submarine were moved to work bays, to be dismantled by welders and mechanics under the watchful eye of intelligence experts.
The
Glomar Explorer
had to be moved a short distance to a new site to reach the next section of the broken submarine. Once the ship was repositioned, the whole operation began again. Since the submarine had most likely broken upon impact with the seabed rather than on the surface before it sank, the major pieces were not strewn over a large area.
Clyde W. Burleson, author of
The Jennifer Project,
interviewed dozens of crew members who worked on the recovery. Eyewitnesses told Burleson that the K-129 was raised in four or more sections, with crews working back-to-back, twelve-hour shifts. The crews were able to add pipe around the clock, at an average rate of 340 feet per hour, to reach the debris field, approximately sixteen thousand feet below the surface.
Glomar Explorer
was on site under good operating conditions for approximately five weeks, from July 4 to August 12. Each trip to the bottom took forty-five to forty-eight hours; the return trips took approximately the same amount of time. Even with delays for maintenance, repairs, relocation of the ship to different sites, and crew rest periods between each recovery, there was enough time on this mission to have made five to seven round trips.
Despite an elaborate cover-up and the eventual claim that Project Jennifer had been a failure, most of K-129 and the remains of the crew were, in fact, raised from the bottom of the Pacific and brought into the
Glomar Explorer.
Once the retrieval of the submarine was accomplished, the debris was diagnosed in one of the largest autopsies in history. Experts in every related field of science and technology had been assembled by the CIA to begin analysis of the treasure while the recovery ship was still at sea.
For intelligence purposes, it was most important to recover the center of the submarine. This included the control room beneath the conning tower, the whole conning tower with adjoining missile launch tubes, and the two ballistic missiles and one nuclear warhead that had not been destroyed by the initial blast. The missile in tube one had been completely demolished. The warhead was blown off the missile in the second tube, adjacent to the area of the explosion. The pressure hull, the upper deck, and the sail adjoining missile tube one were damaged from the exploding missile, but except for the ten-foot-wide gash, this section had remained intact. If this vital section could be recovered, the intelligence experts thought they might retrieve irrefutable proof that K-129 had been destroyed in an attempt to launch a nuclear missile.
The command center located immediately beneath the forward section of the conning tower contained the codes, charts, and written records of the mission. The CIA circulated a rumor that scientists at NASA’s Lewis Center had developed technology using lasers and vacuum chambers to treat paper damaged by salt water. According to the planted story, the CIA claimed it could restore and peruse any papers, logs, charts, books, diaries, and notes recovered from the K-129 wreck, even those that had soaked for more than six years on the bottom of the ocean.
Other evidence to be gained by physically reclaiming the control center of the sunken submarine might have proved useful. Guidance and launch data programmed on cassettes in computer consoles could provide clues about the submarine’s intended target on March 7, 1968.
Logically, the overseers of an operation as extensive as this one would have gone for the most valuable evidence first. The center of the submarine, including the conning tower and the missile tubes, had to be the first target for recovery.
The CIA later claimed that only the forward-most section of the submarine was recovered. They acknowledged they did recover two nuclear-tipped torpedoes from the undamaged first compartment. There has been no mention of the disposition of any regular torpedoes that might have been in the compartment. If this section had been recovered in undamaged condition, the nuclear torpedoes would not have leaked radioactive material from the warheads into that compartment. Torpedoes carrying nuclear warheads were built to withstand depth pressures up to twenty thousand feet. They would not explode or rupture unless they were damaged when the submarine smashed into the ocean floor.