Authors: Kenneth Sewell
The mystery surrounding the sunken sub has given rise to a number of other books on various aspects of the K-129 incident and Project Jennifer. The CIA’s elaborate effort to keep the details secret may have increased interest in the story, although much that has been written by authors, journalists, and historians relies, at least in part, on the Agency’s version of what happened.
Perhaps even more chilling than the CIA’s attempt to hide the truth from the public is evidence that the Agency may have denied many of the facts to the nation’s top decision-maker. There is a small, but revealing, notation in a declassified “Memorandum for the Record” (sometimes known as a cover-your-ass or CYA memo) that George H. W. Bush, then CIA director, who was to become the forty-first president of the United States, wrote to himself.
Time
magazine, in its December 6, 1976, issue, reported that all of the K-129 had been retrieved with a “technical mother lode” of intelligence material. The Bush memorandum noted that President Ford had been briefed about the
Time
story on the extent of the
Glomar Explorer
’s retrieval from the K-129 wreck site. He wrote:
“Glomar Explorer: I stated to the President that we had leveled, and that the
Time
magazine story which was out yesterday was totally false.”
A startling conclusion could be drawn from that terse notation. The CIA may have denied even the president of the United States a full accounting of the clandestine Project Jennifer. Or, a different conclusion could be drawn. This may be the first documented case of the Agency providing a president with another kind of cover that came to be known as “credible deniability.”
Project Jennifer was so wrapped in secrecy, disinformation, official propaganda, and downright lies that even today, years after the sinking of K-129, dozens of widely different versions of the story persist.
M
ANY OF THE MOST SENSITIVE FILES
on major events of the Cold War era—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the toppling of regimes, and many highly secret operations—have long since been declassified by the U.S. government and made available to the public and historians.
Why then, more than three decades after the sinking and recovery of the wrecked Soviet submarine, and a decade after the Cold War ended, do the Central Intelligence Agency and other branches of the United States government so tenaciously cling to the secrets of the K-129 incident? What truth is so terrible that it cannot be told? Only a handful of men in the highest levels of American and Russian governments were ever privy to the complete story of events that left even the admirals and generals “out of the loop.”
The incident occurred in an era when mutual assured destruction (MAD) was the prime defense policy that prevented the use of weapons capable of wiping the human race from the planet—when presidents and premiers played madman war games as strategy. Billions were spent on defense in the Free World, and the Soviet Union spent itself into ruin, trying to keep up. Public knowledge that these games with nuclear weapons had spun wildly out of control, and that all the treasuries of the superpowers could not have prevented the rogue attack, would certainly have destabilized society. Leaders would not have wanted the dark secret revealed, either in the Soviet Union or in America.
It would be unthinkable to admit that the reckless proliferation of weapons of mass destruction had brought the world so close to the edge, that mankind was only a ten count and a fail-safe device away from a rogue nuclear attack on a major city. How could the safeguards have been so flawed that a handful of fanatical men and an old-model submarine came so close to determining the fate of billions of people?
For almost fifty years, American and Russian leaders practiced this kind of brinkmanship with nuclear weapons, bringing their people close to atomic Armageddon.
The fact that this “mad” proliferation policy came close to creating doomsday in the lone rogue scenario can provide an explanation for why the CIA and the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB in Russia, have doggedly kept information about the K-129 hidden in confusion and secrecy for so long. Both governments apparently determined that the near-catastrophe of the K-129 incident was a secret the people could never be told.
Investigative journalists and public watchdog groups in the United States apparently suspected that something of that magnitude was suggested by the extreme confidentiality the U.S. government placed on the files of the
Glomar Explorer
operation. In an attempt to pry loose public disclosure about Project Jennifer, two major, precedent-setting lawsuits were filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi, who was the Washington correspondent for
Rolling Stone
magazine, sued the CIA in U.S. District Court in Washington after the Agency refused her FOIA request of March 21, 1975, for information about the project. Felice D. Cohen and Morton H. Halperin, representing the Military Audit Project, a defense expenditures watchdog organization, sued the CIA over its denial of a similar request for documents in a FOIA action filed on April 3, 1975. In both cases the district court issued summary judgments in late 1975, upholding the CIA’s refusal to provide documents about Project Jennifer and the
Glomar Explorer.
The plaintiffs then took their cases to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, setting off six years of legal battles that were waged in the federal courts throughout the terms of three CIA directors. The core issues of freedom of information versus government secrecy were not finally resolved by the federal appellate court until 1981. The legal precedents established by the so-called Glomar cases provide much of the cover that intelligence agencies and other government bodies use today to hide information from the public.
The government’s defense of CIA secrecy in the matter—what the intelligence community sought to hide—turned out to be highly revelatory in and of itself.
The Agency argued that the project had to be kept secret because any “official acknowledgement of involvement by U.S. Government agencies would disclose the nature and purpose of the program and could…severely damage the foreign relations and the national defense of the United States.”
While the CIA had authorized the release of fewer than two thousand pages of heavily redacted classified information about Project Jennifer, it held “about 128,000 documents” related to the operation, according to the lawsuit.
The CIA noted in its response that “the government has not officially confirmed the purpose of the Glomar Explorer Project.”
The government argued that, despite the unofficial leaks, the FOIA request should be denied because the CIA “still has something to hide; the reported purpose of the
Glomar Explorer
’s mission may well be notorious, but, the government implicitly suggests, its actual purpose may well still be a secret, or, at least, unresolved doubt may still remain in the minds of the United States’ potential and actual adversaries as to the true purpose of the mission.”
The FOIA case was brought by journalist Phillippi in an effort to “reveal the purpose of the
Glomar Explorer
venture” and its results. But the FOIA request went further, and challenged the CIA’s campaign of disinformation and distortion of facts. The suit additionally demanded release of records of the 1975 conversations surrounding the cover-up between former CIA Director William Colby and the news media.
“In response to the appellant’s March 1975 request for records, the CIA refused even to confirm or deny the very existence of such records,” Phillippi’s appeal noted.
The appeals court acknowledged that complaint to be true. However, the court found that, even though some information had leaked and the intelligence agency might have planted false stories, there was justification for withholding additional information. “If the CIA were not allowed to engineer controlled leaks of information, it would not be able to protect its possible fallback cover,” a confirming appellate judge stated.
The appeals court found it understandable that the CIA might need to “buttress the credibility of a widely disseminated fallback cover story.” Thus, the law condoned the government’s legal authority, not only to refuse access to certain types of information, but to fabricate stories to mislead the news media.
“Once the story was out, reporters and editors began to speculate as to why the CIA had undertaken the apparently hopeless mission,” the court review noted.
The appeal cited a
Time
magazine conclusion in its March 31, 1975, issue: “There are several theories…. The last theory…suggesting that raising a Soviet submarine was not [the project’s] mission at all, but the supreme cover for a secret mission as yet safely secure.”
In ruling against both FOIA applicants, the appeals court found that the CIA’s case for secrecy should be upheld. The decision stated, “It is far from clear that either the purpose of the
Glomar Explorer
mission or the technology used to accomplish that mission are in fact known. We have been given two stories [by the government] which purport to explain the
Glomar Explorer
’s mission: first, we were told the
Glomar Explorer
was designed to mine manganese nodules from the ocean floor, and then, we were told that it was designed to lift a Russian submarine. Both stories, though very different, were plausible. The truth may lie in yet a third direction.”
The ruling concluded: “In sum, neither we nor the appellants can be sure we know what intelligence capabilities and purposes were embodied in the
Glomar Explorer.”
In upholding the federal district courts’ earlier rulings that refused the journalist and the watchdog group access to CIA records, the appeals court established a sweeping new precedent that gave government intelligence agencies an important exemption to the Freedom of Information Act. That exemption came to be known as the “Glomar response” or “Glomarization.”
The precedent-setting ruling that established the Glomar response provides that a government agency does not even have to acknowledge it has specific information requested under federal freedom of information laws, let alone defend its classified status against a FOIA request.
This Glomar exception has since become a favorite tool of the American intelligence community and other government agencies to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Solicitor General’s Office frequently reminds all government agencies of their immunity from responding to media questions on sensitive matters. A 1998 memo from that office reads: “As you may know, a Glomar response is an agency’s express refusal even to confirm or deny the existence of any records responsive to a FOIA request.”
Since the Glomar response became law, the CIA has taken full advantage of this legal cover, and not even the smallest detail about the K-129 incident—no matter how apparently insignificant—has been declassified. Requests for information made by citizens, veterans’ organizations, authors, reporters, and historians can be routinely denied using the Glomar response to the Freedom of Information Act, without further explanation. The agency invoking the exception does not even have to acknowledge the existence of the files in question.
The world knew the Cold War was truly over when, in October 1992, America’s top spy was sent to Moscow to pay a state visit to his former nemesis, the KGB. CIA Director Robert M. Gates arrived in Moscow in October 1992. Significantly, the gift the American spy chief selected to take to the former Soviets was an item from the decades-old K-129 incident.
“As a gesture of intent, a symbol of a new era, I carried with me the Soviet naval flag that had draped the coffins of the half-dozen Soviet sailors whose remains the
Glomar Explorer
had recovered when it raised part of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine from deep in the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1970s,” Gates wrote in his autobiography,
From the Shadows.
“I also was taking to Yeltsin a videotape of their burial at sea, complete with prayers for the dead and the Soviet national anthem—a dignified and respectful service even at the height of the Cold War.”
Director Gates not only delivered the mementos of that controversial episode, but also was the first head of an American spy agency to tour the former fortress of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. It was truly a thaw in cold relations, since this was the foreign intelligence arm that had been locked in mortal competition with the CIA and other American intelligence agencies since the end of World War II.
But even this goodwill gesture rang rather hollow, since the peace offering paid only lip service to the lingering mystery of the K-129. Tellingly, Gates stuck to the CIA cover story that only six bodies had been recovered from the wreckage, even though eyewitnesses had already told the public that several dozen more bodies were retrieved. During the visit, Gates also met with his counterpart, Yevgeny Primakov, the head of the Russian intelligence service, and pledged cooperation in resolving the outstanding issues that stood in the way of a full reconciliation between the two former adversaries.
An opening in relations seemed swiftly to follow this historic meeting, but the K-129 was to remain a point of contention between the former Soviets and the Americans.