Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (70 page)

The camera showed that a 10-foot-wide hole had been blown in the sub’s hull right behind the conning tower. That led the analysts to speculate that the sub had suffered a catastrophic explosion while charging its batteries. The batteries give off explosive hydrogen gas while they’re charging, and a spark from the engines could have ignited the gas.

The Navy had found the Soviet sub. Now what?

SUNKEN TREASURE

Apparently, telling the Soviets where to find their submarine was never given serious consideration—after all, this was during the Cold War. And the Soviets never did figure out where
K-129
was, so eventually they called off their search. There the submarine lay, at the bottom of the ocean, a potential treasure trove of intelligence information:

• Recovering a nuclear warhead would enable the United States to gauge the sophistication of Soviet weapons.

• Recovering a torpedo would make it possible to build countermeasures against them.

• Recovering cryptographic machines and materials would help the U.S. decipher encoded communications.

• Examining sections of the hull might reveal how deep Soviet subs were capable of operating.

The problem was that the sub was more than 17,000 feet under water. American submarines operate at a depth of only about 1,300 feet; if they go any deeper, they can be crushed by the tremendous pressure of the ocean. The Navy proposed sending unmanned mini subs to recover the nuclear warheads and the cryptographic equipment. But the CIA, which by now had joined the project, proposed a much more ambitious scheme: why not pull the entire submarine up to the surface?

Aaaaaaaah! Only humans and elephants recognize…

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Picking up something as massive as a submarine from the ocean floor had never been done before. When CIA director Richard Helms first heard the idea, he replied, “You must be crazy.” But the United States already had a secret program to recover Soviet missiles that had been test fired over the Pacific, and recovering a submarine was the same thing, only on a larger scale. Besides, if the U.S. developed the capability to recover Soviet subs, they could use it to recover any American subs that might sink, preventing their secrets from falling into Soviet hands. The program was approved; the CIA set to work designing a ship that could do the job.

THE NUTTY BILLIONAIRE

Raising a sub from the ocean floor was a tricky enough problem in its own right. Doing it without the Soviets realizing you were doing it was another thing entirely. How was the CIA going to keep it a secret?

They decided to work through the eccentric industrialist (and billionaire) Howard Hughes. Hughes had a lot to offer: His companies had done classified work for the government, and he was obsessed with secrecy. His Glomar Marine Corporation was interested in undersea mining—a field that involves pulling tons of material up from the ocean floor—which made it a good cover. And Hughes had a reputation as being a bit of a nut, so when he announced that he was building the world’s first deep-sea mining ship—the
Glomar Explorer—
to harvest “manganese nodules” from the ocean floor, no one suspected that he was really acting as a front for the CIA. The cover story was so effective, in fact, that after his announcement, other companies began looking into mining for the “potato-sized” manganese nodules too.

…and react emotionally to the bones of their own kind.

SPY SHIP

Another Hughes subsidiary, the Hughes Tool Company, designed the 50,000-ton ship, which was 618 feet in length—twice as long as the
K-129
. It would serve as the mother ship to a giant submersible barge called the
Hughes Mining Barge-1
, which would do the actual lifting of the
K-129.

The barge was about as big as a football field and contained eight sets of giant claws, similar to salad tongs, suspended from a large platform. The system worked like this: the
Glomar Explorer
would lower the
Hughes Mining Barge
all the way down to the wreck of the
K-129
, then the giant claws would close around the sub. Once the claws were secure, the barge and the submarine would be slowly and carefully floated back to the surface. Once there, it could either be hidden inside the
Glomar Explorer
, which had a 200-foot-long trapdoor beneath the waterline, or it could be left on the
Hughes Mining Barge
under a giant curved roof, similar to a Quonset hut, to prevent the sub from being observed by Soviet spy planes or satellites.

PROJECT JENNIFER

It took more than two years to build and test the system, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1974 that the
Glomar Explorer
was ready for action. The ship left port with a 170-man crew of CIA agents, only 40 of whom knew what the real mission was.

What happened next depends on who you believe. The details of the recovery mission, code-named “Project Jennifer,” are still classified, and the various sketchy accounts of the mission that have been published contradict each other on many points. They don’t even agree on whether the
K-129
lay intact or broken into pieces. At the very least, it was in very fragile condition, having been damaged first by the initial explosion that crippled it and caused it to sink, then by the tremendous ocean pressure that crushed it like a soda can as it sank three miles to the bottom. The
K-129
slammed into the ocean floor at an estimated 200 mph, which caused still more damage.

The
Glomar Explorer
arrived at the site, found the sub, and was able to lower the barge down to the wreck without incident. But getting its giant hooks around the damaged sub was another story: Because it was partially buried, the claws had to dig through the sea bed to get a proper grip. They apparently dug a little too deep—some of the hooks were so badly damaged that they couldn’t grasp the submarine. The decision was made to try and raise the sub anyway. Lifting at a rate of six feet a minute, the
Glomar Explorer
managed to lift the submarine 5,000 feet off the ocean floor… only to have it break apart, with some of the most valuable parts—including the nuclear missiles—falling back to the ocean floor.

Something to sweat about: The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred in the last 2 decades.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

That’s
one
version of the story, anyway. Another is that the entire submarine—nukes, torpedoes, cryptographic machines, everything—was successfully recovered, and that the tale about the sub falling back into the ocean was created as a cover story to conceal one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 20th century.

Still another version of the story says that after blowing more than $300 million on the project, the CIA watched everything but a tiny, worthless scrap of the sub slip from its grasp, leaving it with nothing to show for all the money that had been spent. The CIA then made up the story of salvaging part of the sub to cover up their blunder.

Which story is true? Your guess is as good as ours.

THE SECRET GETS OUT

One thing that is certain is that the secret of the
Glomar Explorer
had already begun to leak out even before it set out to sea in the summer of 1974. The
Los Angeles Times
broke the story on its front page on February 7, 1975, reportedly while the
Glomar Explorer
was at the site of the
K-129
, making a second attempt to recover more of the wreckage. Because the mission was still underway and lives were at risk, William Colby, the new director of the CIA, managed to get the story pushed back to
page 18
in the later editions of the
L.A. Times
, and accomplished the same with a similar story in
The New York Times
the following month. The story finally blew wide open on March 18, when columnist Jack Anderson reported it on national television.

15 MINUTES OF FAME

The exposure of the
Glomar Explorer
in newspapers all over the world, complete with photographs, ruined its effectiveness as a spy ship. Now that the Soviets and everyone else knew what it really was, it could no longer be sent on clandestine missions without causing an international incident.

Does the similarity end there? The balanced diet for a human is about the same as that of a rat.

OUT OF ACTION

For the next five years it went back to what it claimed to have been doing the whole time—working as a deep-sea mining ship. Then in 1980 Hughes Global Marine returned the ship to the U.S. Navy, which added it to the “mothball fleet” of inactive naval ships anchored in Suisun Bay outside of San Francisco. Anyone crossing the Benicia Bridge could see it clearly.

The
Glomar Explorer
sat at anchor for the next 16 years, until Global Marine leased it back from the government in 1996 and spent a reported $150 million refitting it to drill for oil on the ocean floor. The retrofit removed much of the equipment used to raise the
K-129
, so the
Explorer
will likely spend the remaining time on its 30-year-lease exploring for oil just like Global Marine says it will.

…Or maybe that’s just what the CIA
wants
us to think.

*        *        *

FROM THE BAD JOKE FILE

A man who wanted to achieve enlightenment made a pilgrimage to a Buddhist monastery high in the mountains. There he found the wisest monk and told him his goal. The monk replied, “To reach enlightenment, you must take a vow of silence for 10 years.”

After 10 years of silent meditation, the monk said to the man, “You may now speak.”

“My bed is too hard,” said the man.

“You have not yet reached enlightenment,” replied the monk. “You must not speak again for 10 years.”

So the man remained silent for 10 more years, and then the monk came to him and said, “You may now speak.”

“The food here is too cold,” he said.

“You still have not yet reached enlightenment,” said the monk.

So the man took another vow of silence. Ten years later—after 30 years of meditation—he was again allowed to speak.

“I quit,” he said.

“Good,” replied the monk. “All you do is complain, anyway.”

In Elkhart, Indiana, it’s against the law for a barber to threaten to cut off a child’s ears.

AUDIO TREASURES

More of Uncle John’s favorite old-time radio shows.

G
UNSMOKE (CBS, 1952–61)
Gunsmoke
, radio’s first Western series for adults, is considered by many fans to be the best radio drama ever produced. The show’s creators placed great emphasis on realism; episodes dealt with mature themes like scalpings, massacres, and the relationship between Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty, the “saloon girl.” (Although it was never stated explicitly, it was much clearer on the radio series than on the TV show that Kitty was a prostitute.) On
Gunsmoke
there was no guarantee of a happy ending, either—the good guys sometimes got killed, and it wasn’t unusual for criminals to skip town before they were punished for their crimes.

Things to Listen For:
The show’s incredible attention to detail. If a character fired a Winchester rifle, the sound crew recorded a real Winchester rifle shot to use on the show. Saloon scenes were taped with a piano player in a roomful of extras who were milling around just as if they were in a real saloon. And does Marshall Matt Dillon’s voice sound familiar? That’s William Conrad, who worked on numerous other radio shows, did voiceovers on dozens of TV and radio commercials, and narrated the
Rocky & Bullwinkle
show. Why didn’t he play Marshall Dillon on television? Conrad’s radio portrayal was terrific, but TV producers thought he was too overweight to be believable as a U.S. marshall. Conrad finally did make it to TV—first in 1971, starring in the detective series
Cannon
, and again in 1987, starring in the appropriately titled
Jake and the Fatman
(hint: he didn’t play Jake).

JOURNEY INTO SPACE (BBC, 1953–58)

Unlike most science fiction programs which were complete flights of fancy, this British show was grounded in the real physics of space flight. In one episode a group of reporters is given a tour of a launch pad on the moon; the description of the spacecraft is so true to life that the modern listener may forget that the show predated the Apollo moon landing by 15 years. The realism helped make it one of most listened-to radio series in the history of the BBC, and the last one to attract a larger audience than the television shows that were on at the same time.

Can you spot her? Martin Scorsese’s mother made cameo appearances in four of his films.

Things to Listen For:
Lemmy, the clueless Cockney member of the crew. He has presumably spent years training for the first mission to the moon in episode 1, yet after the ship blasts off he is surprised to find out that he is weightless in space. Why? In the early 1950s, most listeners had no understanding of space flight; having someone explain it to Lemmy was the show’s way of telling the audience what a trip to the moon would really be like.

GANGBUSTERS (CBS/NBC/Mutual, 1935–1957)

Gangbusters
wasn’t the first show about gangsters vs. lawmen, but it was the first one based on the case files of real-life criminals. Creator Phillips H. Lord won the cooperation of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover by promising that he would only present stories based on closed cases—the ones in which the crooks had already been apprehended by the FBI.