Authors: Kenneth Sewell
Several eyewitnesses, however, later told reporters of high levels of radiation present in the wreckage brought into the
Glomar Explorer.
The only other sources of radioactive material on K-129, which was a diesel-electric-powered submarine without a nuclear reactor aboard, were the three missile warheads located in the center of the submarine. Two of these warheads were ripped apart in the initial explosion, scattering fissile material throughout the conning tower and probably the operations center. Photographs from the USS
Halibut
had confirmed this damage. The third Serb missile with its warhead remained undamaged in launch tube three.
The radioactive wreckage encountered by the
Glomar
crew dismantling the section of the submarine had to be from these warheads. The eyewitness stories about the radioactivity in the wreckage were strong evidence that much of the central section of the submarine was raised into the moon pool of the recovery ship.
After the initial section was raised, a high-level CIA official called a meeting of the work crews and warned that the submarine was “hot.” He gave them an option to continue to work or not. For those who opted to stay on the job despite the possibility of exposure to radiation, “special uniforms” were provided, including a “full-length cotton jumper and a shiny outer uniform that seemed to have a metallic content.” The workmen’s sleeves and ankles were taped, and they wore oxygen masks, hoods, and built-in microphones while they dismantled the parts. The crewmen reported that they had to scrub for hours after each work session, and all their clothing had to be tossed overboard.
Another description of the dangerous working conditions on
Glomar Explorer
was reported in
A Matter of Risk
by Roy Varner and Wayne Collier, published in 1978. Coauthor Collier was a federal undercover agent with intimate details of the operation. He had been the chief personnel recruiter for the project.
“Sensors brought into the area, however, registered a high level of radioactivity emanating from inside the metal mass,” the eyewitness accounts in
A Matter of Risk
revealed. “Those who were finishing the job of wedging timbers underneath the Target Object quickly backed off when told it was hot.”
W
HILE THE CREW ABOARD
the
Glomar Explorer
was intently focused on its work, the CIA had to deal with another problem—Soviet spy ships. The Soviets took notice of the
Glomar Explorer
activities, but they showed no strong interest in disrupting the operation, as the Americans had feared before the mission began. There were reports that the Soviets knew about the mission long before the recovery ship sailed. On several occasions, Soviet spy trawlers dropped by the work site, stayed a few hours, then sailed away.
The CIA most likely took extra measures to ensure the operation was not disrupted once it was underway. There is evidence that the CIA dispatched a decoy ship to the site where the Soviets thought their boat had sunk, hundreds of miles north of the actual location. Even though the Nixon administration had probably already shared tantalizing bits of information about their lost boat with the Soviets, the true location of the wreck site was never revealed and, in fact, has remained one of the most jealously guarded secrets of the K-129 incident.
The
Glomar Explorer
’s sister ship, the smaller
Glomar Challenger,
was so similar in appearance that a spy boat standing off at a distance would be hard-pressed to distinguish between the silhouettes of the two ships. The most prominent feature of both ships was the odd derrick towering above the decks. In hull structure, the two ships were similar. Their profiles were both festooned with cranes, jumbles of pipes, and equipment that only knowledgeable observers could have identified. The main difference was their overall size. The
Glomar Explorer
was approximately fifty feet wider and two hundred feet (or a third) longer than the
Glomar Challenger.
At 618 and 399 feet long, respectively, both were large. Similarly painted, both ships would make highly visible images on a distant horizon.
If the
Glomar Challenger
showed up at a location several hundred miles north of the actual recovery site and within the zone searched earlier by the Soviets, a snooping spy would almost certainly believe he had found the right ship. The Soviet would confidently watch the
Challenger
’s crew raise and lower pipe into the ocean in an operation that mimicked the work going on aboard the
Glomar Explorer.
Protecting the location had always been vital to the K-129 recovery. The CIA’s most widely reported site for the sunken boat was 40° N latitude by 180° W longitude. It was a deliberately misleading location, far from the real site. That location would have placed the wreckage of the Soviet submarine approximately 1,700 miles from Pearl Harbor and well north of any U.S. landfall. More important, the false location would send any Soviet surveillance aircraft or ships far from the site where
Glomar Explorer
was operating. A number of other reports about the wreck site were leaked, placing the location 750 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Another rumored site was just over 830 miles northwest of Hawaii. The last two locations would have been consistent with areas normally patrolled by Soviet missile subs. If the CIA then dispatched the
Glomar Challenger
to one of those more distant locations, any Soviet spy ship or dual-purpose fishing trawler would be well away from the real action.
The whereabouts of the
Challenger
during midsummer 1974 remains a mystery, even though most of that research ship’s schedules for other projects before and after this period are readily available in published scientific records.
Its location in the spring of that year is known. The
Challenger
was conducting oceanographic research about one hundred miles off Cape Horn in April 1974, when it was boarded and temporarily detained by an Argentine navy gunboat. The Argentine captain suspected the ship was involved in illegal oil exploration. The ship was quickly released when it was proven that its purpose was ocean-floor core sampling between the capes of Africa and South America.
Challenger
was involved in the well-documented Deep Ocean Drilling Project from 1968 to 1983, and the legs of its journeys have been fully logged. Yet no activity is reported for this ship in early to late summer 1974.
Recently released information from Soviet naval intelligence does include some of the comings and goings of the
Glomar Challenger,
and indicates the Red Navy was quite suspicious about its activities. This Soviet account makes a strong case that the
Glomar Challenger
was, in fact, used by the CIA as a decoy to lure the Soviets away from the site where the
Glomar Explorer
was working that summer.
The first step in a plan to make sure the Soviets would be looking for the wrong ship in the wrong place was a clandestine operation that occurred in Washington, D.C., shortly before the recovery mission began.
An anonymous note was dropped off at the entrance door to the Soviet embassy. The note read, simply: “Certain special services are taking steps to raise the Soviet submarine which sank in the Pacific.” It was signed, “A Well-wisher.”
A hard-working, but frustrated, young Soviet naval intelligence officer in the Pacific Fleet was not privy to the note until the
Glomar Explorer
’s mission was over. Though ignored by his superiors, he had actually been on to the operation from his own intelligence sources from the beginning.
The intelligence officer was Captain Anatoliy Shtyrov, who would rise to the rank of admiral before his career in the Soviet navy ended. He had already been trying to follow the strange maneuverings of the
Glomar Challenger
in the North Pacific. Shtyrov’s account of his attempts to follow Global Marine company’s drilling activities in the early months of 1974 revealed that Soviet intelligence agents were closely monitoring the site where they believed K-129 had sunk. Shtyrov later recorded his experiences tracking Global Marine ships. He admitted being confused about which ship was which.
Someone had made an effort to attract the Soviets’ attention to the area around 40° N latitude and the 180th meridian, the site seventeen hundred miles northwest of Honolulu and over a thousand miles north of the actual location of the K-129 salvage operation.
Making several attempts to learn what was going on, the Soviet officer sent spy ships, recruited a passing Soviet merchant ship, and dispatched a Tu-95 Bear reconnaissance plane to the site. Cloud cover prevented the Soviet plane from visual observation of the American recovery ship, but the pilot confirmed radar contact at that location. All planes and ships sent by the intelligence officer reported American activity at the scene. Shtyrov concluded that a vessel named
Glomar Explorer,
which he could not find in published directories of ships, was attempting to raise the lost submarine. His dispatch to Moscow read, in part:
“To the Chief of Naval Intelligence. Analysis of the operations conducted by the U.S. ship
Glomar Explorer
at the K-point 40° N 180° W provides grounds to suppose that some agencies in the USA are about to complete preparations, and may soon recover the Soviet submarine K-129, lost in 1968, from the Pacific Ocean.”
The intelligence officer urgently requested that the radio-electronics surveillance ship
Primorye,
which was spying on American missile tests at Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific, be rushed to the site. For some inexplicable reason, Captain Shtyrov was promptly reprimanded with a terse message: “Do not pop up with your stupid ideas; pay more attention to a better quality of performance of planned operations.”
Shtyrov had received reports from several Soviet ships sailing in that area. A Soviet patrol boat, the
Peleng,
operating out of Kamchatka; a small recon ship named
Chazhma;
and a Soviet freighter diverted from its commercial route had all reported a mystery ship busily raising and lowering pipe in the deep, open seas. All three ships reported that a vessel with the name
Glomar Explorer
painted on its stern was conducting what appeared to be drilling operations. A ship’s name is easily changed with a bucket of paint and a brush. It certainly would not have been the first time such a trick had been used to hide a ship’s identity.
These spying ships encountered nothing unusual at the scene. They each observed the busy Americans for several days, then sailed away with notations in their logs that all appeared normal. No interchange between the crews of the American and Soviet ships at that location was mentioned.
That was not the case for Soviet fishing trawlers plying their trade in the Hawaiian Leeward Island fisheries. At least two fishing boats, on separate days, came upon a strange ship operating approximately 350 miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. No report about the odd operation has ever been published by the crew of either Soviet fishing boat. But there are American accounts of the confrontations.
Divergent tales provide strong evidence that two similar ships were operating in the Pacific at the time. Several crewmen from the real
Glomar Explorer
laughingly confirmed incidents involving Soviet trawlers that approached their ship during the recovery operation in late July 1974.
When the first trawler came close enough to the American ship for the crew to see the Soviet seamen pointing cameras at them, they raised their hands in unison and shot them the international high sign or “bird.” Later, another group of workers sunning themselves on the large helicopter pad on the back deck of
Glomar Explorer
reportedly dropped their trousers to “moon” a snooping Soviet fishing trawler.
Neither of these Russian trawlers had been dispatched by Captain Shtyrov to look for a strange American ship operating that far south. These were probably just regular fishing boats with curious crews that happened onto the scene of the real recovery operation.
Years later, Shtyrov stated unequivocally and somewhat angrily that the Americans who were manning the ship that his spy boats had observed “did not lower their pants and did not show bare butts to the Soviet sailors.”
While Soviet spy boats did not hamper the operation, another strange twist in the saga was about to occur, which could have derailed the project, even as it was nearing completion. The originator of the fantastic Jennifer Project, Richard M. Nixon, was facing impeachment and early eviction from the White House.
During the first weeks of the recovery operation, the president had personally taken a keen interest in operations at the site of the K-129 wreck. Both the White House and CIA headquarters received daily reports via encrypted radio transmissions. The
Glomar Explorer,
which had been on station since July 4, was only three days away from completing its mission when President Nixon suddenly announced he would resign, rather than face an impeachment trial in Congress.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon departed the White House after telling his staff goodbye and protesting that he had done nothing wrong. Within two hours, Gerald R. Ford was hurriedly administered the oath of office. He then assured the people that the “long national nightmare” was over.
Within hours of taking office, President Ford was confronted by the CIA with details on the status of Project Jennifer.
Ford had been given a minimum briefing on Project Jennifer shortly after assuming the appointment as vice president to replace Spiro Agnew. As the new president, he had to decide if the recovery operations should continue, in the face of almost certain outrage by the Soviets if the mission were exposed.
Project Jennifer was so sensitive that it was not discussed in the written President’s Daily Brief. The president received only verbal updates, and no records of these conversations were kept. Ford wrote in his memoirs that a grim-faced group of his highest advisors approached him about the project early in the morning of his second day in the Oval Office. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and CIA Director William Colby—who had all assumed their positions after the project had been hatched four years earlier—came into his office to request his immediate decision. President Ford had to reaffirm the secret project and authorize its completion. This may well have been his first official act as thirty-eighth president of the United States.
“I did not feel the
Glomar
action was a gamble. I was convinced we had to take the risk,” President Ford wrote in his memoirs.
Within a few days of the new president’s taking office, the
Glomar Explorer
concluded its mission, and Project Jennifer was ready to sail into the next, even stranger phase of the already weird K-129 episode.