Authors: Kenneth Sewell
A Lockheed worker who was witness to some of the follow-up operations in Project Jennifer said that when the parts of the submarine arrived at Redwood City, security went from “tight to air tight” at the building where the submarine was at least partially reassembled. “The Russian submarine” was stored in this sealed warehouse and the guards had orders to “shoot to kill,” the former Lockheed contract worker said.
At the same time, the giant claw, which was still aboard the HMB-1, was dismantled, cut apart with electric torches, and completed destroyed. The eyewitness also said that occasionally workmen involved with the project were told not to come to work until after noon, and guards later said “important-looking suits” had visited the building on those mornings.
Whether the entire Golf submarine—all 324 feet of it—was reassembled inside the warehouse is not known. During this phase of the operation, the warehouse floor looked much like a modern-day hangar used in a National Transportation Board probe. NTB investigators put together the pieces of crashed airliners on hangar floors to determine the cause of a crash. The purpose of reassembling the submarine was the same—to determine exactly what caused the explosion that sank the boat.
The whereabouts of the recovered submarine parts are unknown. There are any number of large, highly secured buildings scattered around the bay at Navy facilities on Mare Island, Alameda, and at the abandoned, but still secured, Hunters Point Navy Shipyard, ten miles up the bay from the old Lockheed site. If K-129 was no longer needed for any intelligence or political value, it may also have simply been buried with the many other secrets of the Cold War. The nine-hundred-acre Hunters Point Shipyard is the site of a sixty-three-acre landfill, which is highly toxic from radiation waste dumped there over the years. The dumpsite could easily accommodate and disguise the irradiated hull plates and interior sections of a dismembered Soviet submarine, along with its accumulation of other radioactive parts from naval nuclear reactors of that era. In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency declared a section of the shipyard to be one of the most contaminated sites in America, and added it to the Superfund clean-up list.
A public brouhaha was soon to follow the unpublicized arrival of the salvaged K-129 on American shores. The CIA’s peculiar conduct over the next several months was further testimony to the importance the government placed on keeping the entire clandestine operation from the world.
The truth that Project Jennifer was a success became deeply buried in the CIA’s own strange version of the recovery. The original cover story about the
Glomar Explorer
being an ore-mining ship began unraveling three months after the recovery was completed and the Soviet submarine returned to the San Francisco Bay area.
After the mission succeeded and valuable encrypted codebooks and encryption equipment were recovered, the CIA did not want the Soviets to learn that the U.S. Navy could read their most sensitive naval communications. This secret held for more than a year, before the Soviets apparently learned American intelligence could capture their microburst transmissions.
But after all the compelling reasons for secrecy were no longer necessary or valid, even years after the end of the Cold War, the CIA continued to orchestrate one of the biggest clandestine campaigns in the history of the United States. The campaign to hide the facts about K-129, the
Glomar Explorer,
and Project Jennifer took on a life of its own. Long after the operations to raise the sunken sub were completed, keeping the secrets became a major CIA project.
B
EFORE THE MAGNIFICENT RECOVERY SHIP
Glomar Explorer
was temporarily put into America’s National Defense Reserve Fleet in Suisun Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, the CIA began spinning a yarn that painted its own operation as an incompetent boondoggle of near Key-stone Kops proportions.
During the Cold War years, the Agency had been adept at creating legends to hide the identities of its deep-cover operatives and foreign espionage agents. In the case of Project Jennifer, it created a major legend to completely subvert the truth. The big lie at the heart of the legend was that only the front thirty-eight feet of K-129 had been retrieved. Since little of value was located in that section of a Soviet Golf submarine, the mission could be considered a $500 million failure.
The disinformation campaign posited that nothing of intelligence value, except two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, was retrieved.
According to that story, the mission was aborted when the giant claw became disabled during the first dive and no more recovery attempts could be made. Supposedly, while raising the
whole
submarine, the giant claw had cracked under the four-thousand-ton weight of the water-filled wreck. About halfway to the surface, most of the K-129 was dumped back into the deep.
The CIA even embellished the story of failure with a hair-raising episode that would thrill the tabloid journalists. They claimed that, just as the Soviet sub was being raised, one of the nuclear missiles slid out of its launch tube and headed to the bottom. The projectile gained speed as it went down. The implication was that the missile could have exploded beneath the ship and set off a nuclear blast that would have blown
Glomar Explorer
and the whole brave crew to kingdom come.
This melodramatic tale was aired in several television documentaries. In one show, a cartoonlike submarine is depicted being hoisted from the ocean floor by a giant claw. Suddenly, teeth in the huge device break and the submarine begins to fall apart, spilling a one-megaton ballistic missile. The missile races to the bottom, nose first, to the sound of throbbing music. A scene focuses on the face of a worker on the
Glomar Explorer,
implying this man and the crew are about to be destroyed in a nuclear blast when the wayward missile reaches the bottom, three miles down. Then, nothing happens. Since the depicted scene never did occur, that was the most accurate part of the presentation.
The CIA knew full well that simple impact would not have set off the nuclear warhead. During the Cold War, there were several instances when nuclear bombs either fell accidentally from aircraft without exploding or survived the impacts of bomber crashes. In the case of the K-129, the missile never slipped from the launch tube in the first place.
In all probability there was only one missile left, that in tube number three. The tube itself would have suffered implosion as the submarine sank, squeezing around the missile and preventing it from falling out.
The CIA claimed that no nuclear warheads, no ballistic missile, no codes or radio transmitters, no missile guidance system, and no navigational systems—nothing of value—could be recovered in the operation. To reinforce the new legend, even this disinformation was stamped top-secret. This clever cover story was to become a major success by the standards used to measure the successes of Cold War spydom—perfect disinformation.
The CIA learned that a number of journalists were beginning to nose about the huge project, and hurriedly developed the disinformation campaign in the event of a major leak. Agency officials may have reasoned that if there had to be a leak, the damage could be mitigated by obscuring the truth with nonsense. But neither of these explanations would seem to justify the enormity of the cover-up to come.
A change in direction from the legitimate need to keep intelligence operations secret for reasons of national security to a clumsy cover-up that generated conspiracy theories, international ill will, and a suspicion that the Americans were hiding a high-seas crime, was swift and certain. By then, several thousand military personnel and civilians had been involved, so leaks were bound to happen. The CIA decided that nothing truthful about K-129—the location of the sinking, or the recovery operation—could ever be revealed. Rumors had to be quashed with lies, to obscure every aspect of the incident.
First and foremost, the location of the sinking and subsequent recovery had to be forever obfuscated. Stories about the recovery have placed it as far away from Pearl Harbor as the other side of the earth in the Atlantic Ocean, and 1,700 miles northwest of the Hawaiian Islands in the open Pacific. The official version is that the wreck occurred 750 to 800 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor in the open North Pacific, while the real location was likely little more than 350 miles away, just north of the Hawaiian Leeward Islands.
During the recovery operation, the actual position of the sunken submarine would have been known only by ranking members of the
Glomar
crew and the CIA managers. The oil drillers, mechanics, and welders would have known only that they were far out in the open ocean, with no landfall in sight. The Leeward Islands were still far south, beyond the horizon and out of view of the workmen on the
Glomar.
The effort to permanently confuse the rank and file in the crew about their location would also explain the seemingly aimless meandering of their ship after it left the recovery site, and the unusual number of days it took the ship to reach the Hawaiian Islands.
The legitimacy of falsifying locations became dubious as time passed, and the CIA’s sole purpose for perpetuating the lie seemed to be to safeguard its own cover story. The CIA had to make sure that no future dives on the wreck site could be accomplished by American or foreign oceanographers. Only a select few people in the Navy, the CIA, and the
Glomar Explorer
senior crew ever had any need to know exactly where the wreck site was located. Any future attempts to search for what the official story claimed was more than two-thirds of the submarine would be futile, because the cover stories all pointed to locations hundreds of miles from the actual site. No future diving expeditions were likely to set out into the vast ocean without even a clue where to start looking. It was key to the permanent cover story that no one ever locate and inspect the wreck site, because to do so would blow the cover and prove that the Soviet rogue submarine had been almost completely retrieved and carried away. Any future divers would likely have found only small areas of scattered debris left behind after the main sections were recovered.
A second layer to the cover story was created to further discourage anyone from looking for the remains of the wreck, even if they did learn the real location. Intelligence officials seeded another elaborate yarn. This story claimed that when K-129 slipped from the broken jaws of the
Glomar Explorer,
it fell back to the bottom of the sea with such impact that it simply dissolved like “Alka-Seltzer in water,” and nothing could be seen of the submarine’s hulk.
Of course, that story is patently ridiculous on the face of it. Anyone who has seen documentary film of the
Titanic,
the giant liner that sank on April 14, 1912, knows that steel ships do not disintegrate when they crash to the bottom of the ocean. The
Titanic
had a much more traumatic collision with an iceberg than K-129 suffered from an explosion in a launch tube. Both ships hurtled vertically downward more than two and a half miles before impact with the ocean floor. Furthermore, the
Titanic
had sat in corrosive salt water for more than a half-century longer than the K-129.
Coincidentally, there is a thriving scrap-iron business in European coastal waters, centered completely on the salvage of surplus World War I and World War II submarines. These war-surplus U-boats were deliberately scuttled in deep water of the Baltic and North seas to get rid of them after the two world wars. Yet, decades later, they remain in such good condition that the pristine steel in their hulls is highly prized in the European steel industry.
It is probable that if any major part of K-129 had actually fallen back into the sea or was purposely jettisoned by the
Glomar Explorer
crew, it would be clearly visible to a deep-diving submersible today. Of course, there is nothing to see, because most of the submarine was retrieved.
The CIA claimed it recovered six bodies from the wreckage. But there has been evidence reported by ex-Soviet admirals that all or part of at least sixty bodies were recovered, most of them crammed into the first two compartments of the submarine. According to the CIA’s account, only the bodies of six Soviet sailors were found in the small section the Agency claims it recovered.
This part of the tale is also implausible, because with the raising of all or most of the sections of the submarine, many more bodies would certainly have been recovered.
The first major news leaks about the operation came even before the
Glomar
sailed. In June 1974, the CIA had managed to kill stories that appeared in early editions of the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times.
These stories were about a break-in at Hughes Summa Corporation headquarters in California. Along with a large amount of cash, some artwork, and other documents, a memorandum describing the true mission of the
Glomar Explorer
had been taken. The burglary was reported in first editions of both papers. The sudden interest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in what seemed to be a routine local burglary alerted a few reporters that something big was happening. Sources told the reporters about the missing memorandum, which suggested a CIA tie-in to
Glomar Explorer.
The articles even mentioned that the U.S. Navy might be trying to retrieve a lost Soviet submarine. That story was scotched after the CIA made personal calls to the top editors of both newspapers.
The CIA then successfully convinced these reporters who had tripped onto Project Jennifer that they would get better and exclusive stories later. Shortly after the recovery was completed, these newsmen were told that the
Glomar Explorer
had to go back and get the rest of the submarine in a second trip. The big lie about the operation was planted. That trip could not be conducted until a window of good weather conditions returned to the North Pacific, probably in the late spring of 1975, according to the CIA spokesman. There is evidence that, even as the reporters were agreeing to hold their inquiries into the huge project, the giant claw necessary to grab the wreckage was already being dismantled at the Lockheed facility in Redwood City, California.
The first reporter to get a solid tip that Project Jennifer was indeed a much bigger deal than first believed was Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for the
New York Times.
Hersh heard that the CIA operation had already recovered the Soviet submarine. He now knew for sure that
Glomar Explorer
was a CIA ship and not, as the world had been so loudly told, a Howard Hughes ore-mining vessel.
On December 18, 1974, Hersh called CIA Director William Colby for confirmation. Colby, who had been appointed CIA director in 1973 by President Nixon, persuaded the reporter that release of the story would severely damage national security. The CIA director again pleaded that the mission was not completed and that premature disclosure would prevent the Agency from returning to recover the rest of the submarine and its valuable intelligence data. Hersh and the
New York Times,
believing the high-level lie, and for the sake of national security, agreed not to publish. But he extracted a promise that the
New York Times
would be the first to get the story when the time was right.
Hersh was already one of the most famous investigative reporters in America, or infamous in some circles inside the Beltway, for breaking politically embarrassing articles based solely on “leaks.” Most of the top newspaper reporters assigned to the nation’s capital were especially aggressive in developing confidential sources in the various agencies of government, having been recently trounced by the
Washington Post
on the Watergate story.
The diligent, post-Watergate groundwork by investigative reporters in developing the authoritative sources or leaks in the Pentagon and the Agency was about to pay off in this case—though possibly not with the results the reporters and their newspapers had expected. The top news outlets in the United States may well have become the unwitting purveyors of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most masterfully executed bait-and-switch scheme of the Cold War.
On the one hand, the CIA appeared to be trying hard to keep the
Glomar
mission a secret from the American press. On the other, there was an inexplicable effort to keep the Soviets apprised of what was going on with the
Glomar Explorer
’s recovery effort. In 1974, through official channels in Kissinger’s State Department, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was given a formal account of the operation. Kissinger gave Dobrynin the names of three of the sailors whose bodies had been recovered and buried at sea, along with their documents and personal belongings.
Once again, Kissinger seemed to have found some diplomatic value in the wreck of the K-129.