Authors: Kenneth Sewell
P
RESIDENT
N
IXON
’
S UNTIMELY DEPARTURE
from office, just as the
Glomar Explorer
completed recovery of all or most of K-129, left the CIA at sea with more than two thousand tons of scrap metal. While incoming president Gerald Ford was briefed about the project immediately, he certainly did not have time to design a grand scheme for a way to use the extraordinary new intelligence the material might yield. In the confusion of the presidential transition, no one seemed to know what to do with the wreckage of the Soviet submarine. To make matters worse, it was highly radioactive.
On August 12, 1974, the crew pulled the giant claw called Clementine into the moon pool for the last time and proceeded toward Maui in the center of the Hawaiian Islands, about four hundred miles from the recovery site. The
Glomar Explorer
seemed to amble around the Pacific for days longer than the trip to the nearby islands would normally have taken, and then sailed around the islands aimlessly for a few more days. Crewmen said later that a large amount of worthless material, such as mattresses from crew bunks, insulation, and other trash from the wreckage was placed in weighted barrels and dumped at sea. There was a burial at sea with full military honors for some of the Soviet crew’s bodies and body parts recovered from the inner hull of the submarine.
The CIA filmed the ceremony so they could later show the Soviets that the six bodies they claimed to have recovered had been accorded a respectful burial. The film provided another strange piece of evidence, as well. The bodies shown were so well preserved by the great depth and cold that the sailors’ facial features were visible through the thin material used as shrouds. This proved that the cold, oxygen-sparse environment at the sixteen-thousand-foot depth preserved organic material such as flesh—and paper.
The ship docked on August 30, eighteen days after leaving the wreck site. Upon arriving at Maui, some of the scientists and CIA agents debarked with the most valuable secrets retrieved from the submarine. Other Agency and contract technicians remained on board with the bulk of the submarine, including the boat’s frame and hull plates, parts of nuclear weapons, computers, navigation gear, and electronic and mechanical hardware.
Their work completed, the drillers and derrick riggers who had been aboard to string the pipe and retrieve the wrecked sections of the submarine were dropped off and disappeared into waiting charter planes. These skilled technicians, along with mechanics and welders with unique credentials, had been selectively hired and intensively trained on mock-ups of K-129 in a hidden Lockheed facility at Redwood City. But they were not asked to keep in touch for future missions aboard the
Glomar Explorer.
The CIA never mentioned that they would be needed again, so they flew off to exotic locations scattered around the world—places such as Indonesia, Arabia, Venezuela, and U.S. sites in the Gulf of Mexico—where the offshore oil industry exploits the beds of lakes, swamps, and seas. All these men were sent home with fat paychecks and a reminder that they were bound to silence by confidentiality contracts. Their work was done, the mission was accomplished, and some, being the independent types they were, would talk.
It now remained for the few CIA technicians and the ship’s basic crew to bring the ship and its trophy back to the mainland. Still, there seemed to be no direction given to complete that task in a timely way. The
Glomar Explorer
left Hawaii at the end of August and did not arrive back on the West Coast until late September. The trip from Hawaii to California should have taken no more than ten days of continuous sailing, but it had taken almost a month.
There has never been an accounting of the month it took the
Glomar Explorer
to reach its next sighting at the ship’s temporary home port of Long Beach, California. In the dark of night, at a secluded pier in the harbor, a sizable convoy of nondescript trucks, as many as twenty-five, lined up to unload crate after crate from the
Glomar.
One observer said enough crates were unloaded to have packaged a complete submarine.
No bill of lading from the recovery operation has ever been published, and exactly what the
Glomar Explorer
salvaged from the Soviet submarine has been hotly debated for three decades. But a reasonably accurate catalogue of recovered items with intelligence value would not be difficult to prepare.
Starting from the front of the submarine and working toward the stern, the first section would have yielded active and passive sonar arrays, and one or two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, known to have been carried by the Golf II Soviet submarines. It is not likely the CIA would have kept any of the regular torpedoes because the U.S. Navy had plenty of these, previously recovered by American submarines from Soviet tests. Keeping a score of rusting, live torpedoes on board the recovery ship would not have been a very good idea.
From compartment two, which housed the officers’ quarters, captain’s safe, and sonar room, the most valuable cache was the officers’ personal papers, including the diary of the young missile officer previously mentioned, and some of the sonar control equipment.
Odd as it may seem, compartment three, which housed the control center and the action center above with its periscopes, would have yielded very little military hardware of interest, because all the instruments and control panels for this type of submarine were already well known to U.S. Navy intelligence. The items of major interest in this center section would have been the missile control consoles and navigation instrumentation. It is questionable whether the launch control cassettes and computerized programming data for the missile system survived either the fiery blasts that sunk the submarine or six years in the briny deep. However, if cassettes containing launch codes or missile guidance instructions were recovered in readable condition, they might well have provided the “smoking gun” to prove that Pearl Harbor had been the intended target of the aborted missile launch.
Since, after the initial blast, the flaming rocket fuel would probably have engulfed the command center located adjacent to the missile tubes, there is a good possibility that everything else exposed in the room—charts and maps, delicate instruments, and human bodies—was consumed in the first seconds following the explosion of the missile fuel in number-one tube.
The next compartment—four—contained some of the most valuable items the mission was designed to seize. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Navy, and the Central Intelligence Agency all had special interests in what could be found in this section. Of course, the three missile tubes originally contained R-21 Serb (SS-N-5) ballistic missiles, each carrying a one-megaton nuclear warhead. Each tube also contained the D-4 underwater-launch system. Photographs from USS
Halibut
had earlier revealed that at least one missile was still intact after the submarine hit the bottom of the ocean. So the recovery effort almost certainly yielded at least one Soviet ballistic missile.
The missiles and launch systems were, however, rapidly becoming obsolete as the Soviets deployed newer and larger missiles on nuclear-powered submarines. The new missiles carried larger payloads and achieved far greater range than the older ones deployed on the Golf II–type submarine.
The one complete missile was located in launch tube number three, nearest the center of the submarine. If that missile remained intact, the great pressure at a depth of more than three miles would still have crushed the outer casing. Even then, the missile and warhead would have yielded some valuable intelligence about sources of fissile material, electronics, and guidance systems. Recovery of a fail-safe device on the missile might have provided a clue to the cause of the missile malfunction in tube one.
There was yet a greater prize, unique to the K-129, to be found in compartment four. This was the result of the special modification ordered by Captain Vladimir Kobzar back in 1966, while the boat was undergoing upgrades. During that retrofit, the captain had arranged to have the cipher room—which held the codebooks, encryption gear, and microburst transmitter secrets—moved from its normal location in compartment two to compartment four. Thus, there was highly valuable code and communications equipment located in this section of K-129, which would not normally have been in compartment four of a Golf II submarine.
Rumors have long circulated that the K-129’s encryption equipment and codes were recovered with the wrecked boat. Even though the CIA has acknowledged recovering compartment two of the submarine, the Agency has vehemently denied that any vital military secrets were salvaged.
Recently there was confirmation by a highly authoritative source in U.S. Navy circles that these sensitive codes and electronics were, indeed, recovered in the
Glomar Explorer
operation. Dr. Gary E. Weir, historian of science and technology at the U.S. Naval Historical Center, and Walter J. Boyne, former director of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, revealed in their 2003 book
Rising Tide
that these valuable intelligence items had been recovered during Project Jennifer. From a military point of view, this recovery was probably the most valuable intelligence taken from the K-129. Weir and Boyne point out that it was more than a year after the 1974
Glomar Explorer
mission was successfully completed before the Soviets found out that their naval codes had been compromised.
The CIA mission “retrieved the Globus-encrypted communication system, as well as Akula system cryptographic equipment that could send and receive high-speed encrypted radio transmissions,” according to Weir and Boyne. These systems gave the Americans access to the heretofore unreadable microburst transmissions of Soviet submarines. Until that time, the microbursts had only been used by Navy surveillance specialists to locate the deadly Soviet missile submarines. But for more than a year, the Americans were able to decode and read the transmissions of Soviet warships.
The Globus system, a tomelike book, was lead-covered to ensure it could be thrown overboard and rapidly swallowed into the depths of the sea if the Soviet vessel was in danger of being boarded or lost. The Soviets never considered that someday the Americans would go to the bottom of the sea and snatch up their secret—not just the lead-jacketed book, but the entire submarine itself.
An inventory of the remainder of K-129 would not likely find any additional items of military value for the spies who ran Project Jennifer. Aft of compartment four were the compartments containing the diesel and electric motors that drove the submarine—machinery of World War II vintage holding little or no interest for the Americans. The only purpose for raising these sections—compartments five through eight—would have been if the CIA had been tasked with capturing the entire submarine as a macabre trophy of war, or for some geopolitical or propaganda purpose. If K-129 broke into four or more pieces, as eyewitnesses have attested, the
Glomar Explorer
spent enough time on the site to have recovered all sections, with everything that was aboard K-129 on March 7, 1968.
After the ship was unloaded at Long Beach, the
Glomar Explorer
left port and was later seen at a sheltered cove of Catalina Island, off the California coast. It was there that the ship again met up with the strange HMB-1 barge. As with the operation to load the giant claw up through the moon pool from the barge, the unloading operation also required the mating of the two specialty vessels. At this clandestine meeting, the barge was submerged beneath the ship’s moon pool for the claw to be lowered and disconnected. HMB-1 left the scene with the claw enclosed in its hangarlike roof.
Its role in Project Jennifer successfully completed,
Glomar Explorer
sailed away to other fantastic, albeit not so covert, adventures. The
Glomar Explorer
is still at work today, conducting commercial, deep-drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
The HMB-1 had many more missions to accomplish for the CIA and Navy intelligence. The barge soon returned to its mysterious port in the marshes and backwaters of San Francisco Bay at the facilities of Lockheed Marine Division in Redwood, California.
From Long Beach Harbor the dismantled submarine had also been transported to a secured building on this large tract of land. The site was hidden on a narrow canal by the swampy wilderness of Bair Island, fifteen miles south of San Francisco. This area in South San Francisco Bay was home to nautical versions of Lockheed’s skunk works, the secret aviation projects that developed some of the world’s most futuristic combat and spy aircraft. Lockheed and other defense contractors had facilities all around the south bay and its navigable inlets, many of the facilities dating back to World War II.
The crated Soviet submarine was probably taken to one of the most secret of all these facilities, located east of U.S. Highway 101, on a dredged canal fed by Redwood Creek. A dockside building, where the welding and dismantling work crews of the
Glomar
had been trained on a life-size model of the boat, was now used to house the recovered submarine. The highly radioactive parts had to be handled in a special facility equipped to screen leakage from radiation.
The site is today a modern industrial park, but at the time, the hidden buildings were located on unnamed roads between such landmarks as Deepwater Slough and Smith Slough. Lockheed’s spy buildings at 100 and 200 Cardinal Way were demolished after the Cold War. However, before the site and buildings were decontaminated and cleared, they were used for another mysterious HMB-1 project. The barge, docked next to these buildings, served as the assembly facility and mother ship for the Navy’s stealthy
Sea Shadow,
an experimental, radar-evading vessel.