- Dean, Josh.
The Taking of K-129.
New York: Dutton, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-101-98443-7.
-
On February 24, 1968, Soviet
Golf
class submarine K-129 sailed from its base in
Petropavlovsk for a routine patrol in the Pacific Ocean. These
ballistic missile submarines were, at the time, a key part of
the Soviet nuclear deterrent. Each carried three
SS-N-5
missiles armed with one 800 kiloton nuclear warhead per
missile. This was an intermediate range missile which could hit
targets inside an enemy country if the submarine approached
sufficiently close to the coast. For defence and attacking other
ships, Golf class submarines carried two torpedoes with nuclear
warheads as well as conventional high explosive warhead
torpedoes.
Unlike the U.S. nuclear powered Polaris submarines, the Golf
class had conventional diesel-electric propulsion. When
submerged, the submarine was powered by batteries which provided
limited speed and range and required surfacing or
running at shallow snorkel depth for regular recharging by the
diesel engines. They would be the last generation of Soviet
diesel-electric ballistic missile submarines: the
Hotel
class and subsequent boats would be nuclear powered.
K-129's mission was to proceed stealthily to a region of
open ocean north of Midway Atoll and patrol there, ready
to launch its missiles at U.S. assets in the Pacific in
case of war. Submarines on patrol would send coded
burst transmissions on a prearranged schedule to indicate
that their mission was proceeding as planned.
On March 8, a scheduled transmission from K-129 failed to
arrive. This wasn't immediately cause for concern, since
equipment failure was not uncommon, and a submarine commander
might choose not to transmit if worried that surfacing and
sending the message might disclose his position to U.S.
surveillance vessels and aircraft. But when K-129 remained
silent for a second day, the level of worry escalated
rapidly. Losing a submarine armed with nuclear weapons was
a worst-case scenario, and one which had never happened
in Soviet naval operations.
A large-scale search and rescue fleet of 24 vessels, including
four submarines, set sail from the base in Kamchatka, all
communicating in the open on radio and pinging away with
active sonar. They were heard to repeatedly call a ship
named Red Star with no reply. The search
widened, and eventually included thirty-six vessels and
fifty-three aircraft, continuing over a period of
seventy-three days. Nothing was found, and six months
after the disappearance, the Soviet Navy issued a statement
that K-129 had been lost while on duty in the Pacific with
all on board presumed dead. This was not only a wrenching
emotional blow to the families of the crew, but also a
financial gut-shot, depriving them of the pension
due families of men lost in the line of duty and paying only
the one-time accidental death payment and partial pension
for industrial accidents.
But if the Soviets had no idea where their submarine was, this
was not the case for the U.S. Navy. Sound travels huge
distances through the oceans, and starting in the 1950s, the
U.S. began to install arrays of hydrophones (undersea sound
detectors) on the floors of the oceans around the world. By the
1960s, these arrays, called
SOSUS (SOund
SUrveillance System) were deployed and operational in both the
Atlantic and Pacific and used to track the movements of Soviet
submarines. When K-129 went missing, SOSUS analysts went back
over their archived data and found a sharp pulse just a few
seconds after midnight local time on March 11 around 180° West
and 40° North: 2500 km northeast of Hawaii. Not only did the
pulse appear nothing like the natural sounds often picked up by
SOSUS, events like undersea earthquakes don't tend to happen at
socially constructed round number times and locations like this
one. The pulse was picked up by multiple sensors, allowing its
position to be determined accurately. The U.S. knew where the
K-129 lay on the ocean floor. But what to do with that
knowledge?
One thing was immediately clear. If the submarine was in
reasonably intact condition, it would be an intelligence
treasure unparalleled in the postwar era. Although
it did not represent the latest Soviet technology, it would
provide analysts their first hands-on examination of Soviet
ballistic missile, nuclear weapon, and submarine construction
technologies. Further, the boat would certainly be equipped
with cryptographic and secure radio communications gear
which might provide an insight into penetrating the
secret communications to and from submarines on patrol.
(Recall that British breaking of the codes used to communicate
with German submarines in World War II played a major part
in winning the Battle of the Atlantic.) But a glance at a
marine chart showed how daunting it would be to reach
the site of the wreck. The ocean in the vicinity of the
co-ordinates identified by SOSUS was around 5000 metres
deep. Only a very few special-purpose research vessels
can operate at such a depth, where the water pressure is
around 490 times that of the atmosphere at sea level.
The U.S. intelligence community wanted that sub.
The first step was to make sure they'd found it. The
USS
Halibut, a nuclear-powered Regulus cruise missile
launching submarine converted for special operations missions, was
dispatched to the area where the K-129 was thought to lie.
Halibut could not dive anywhere near as deep
as the ocean floor, but was equipped with a remote-controlled,
wire-tethered “fish”, which could be lowered near
the bottom and then directed around the search area,
observing with side-looking sonar and taking pictures. After
seven weeks searching in vain, with fresh food long exhausted
and crew patience wearing thin, the search was abandoned and
course set back to Pearl Harbor.
But the prize was too great to pass up. So Halibut
set out again, and after another month of operating the fish,
developing thousands of pictures, and fraying tempers, there
it was! Broken into two parts, but with both apparently
largely intact, lying on the ocean bottom. Now what?
While there were deep sea research vessels able to descend to
such depths, they were completely inadequate to exploit the
intelligence haul that K-129 promised. That would require going
inside the structure, dismantling the missiles and warheads,
examining and testing the materials, and searching for
communications and cryptographic gear. The only way to do this
was to raise the submarine. To say that this was
a challenge is to understate its difficulty—adjectives
fail. The greatest mass which had ever been raised from
such a depth was around 50 tonnes and K-129 had a mass of 1,500
tonnes—thirty times greater. But hey, why not? We're
Americans! We've landed on the Moon! (By then it was November,
1969, four months after that “one small step”.) And
so,
Project Azorian
was born.
When it comes to doing industrial-scale things in the
deep ocean, all roads (or sea lanes) lead to Global Marine.
A publicly-traded company little known to those outside the
offshore oil exploration industry, this company and its
genius naval architect John Graham had pioneered
deep-sea oil drilling. While most offshore oil rigs,
like those on terra firma, were
firmly anchored to the land around the drill hole, Global
Marine had pioneered the technology which allowed a
ship, with a derrick mounted amidships, to precisely
station-keep above the bore-hole on the ocean floor far
beneath the ship. The required dropping sonar markers on the
ocean floor which the ship used to precisely maintain its
position with respect to them. This was just one part of the
puzzle.
To recover the submarine, the ship would need to lower
what amounted to a giant claw (“That's claw,
not craw!”, you
“Get Smart”
fans) to the
abyssal plain, grab the sub, and lift its 1500 tonne mass
to the surface. During the lift, the pipe string which
connected the ship to the claw would be under such stress
that, should it break, it would release energy comparable
to an eight kiloton nuclear explosion, which would be bad.
This would have been absurdly ambitious if conducted in the
open, like the Apollo Project, but in this case it also had to
be done covertly, since the slightest hint that the U.S. was
attempting to raise K-129 would almost certainly provoke a
Soviet response ranging from diplomatic protests to a naval
patrol around the site of the sinking aimed at harassing the
recovery ships. The project needed a cover story and a cut-out
to hide the funding to Global Marine which, as a public company,
had to disclose its financials quarterly and, unlike minions of
the federal government funded by taxes collected from
hairdressers and cab drivers through implicit threat of
violence, could not hide its activities in a “black
budget”.
This was seriously weird and, as a
contemporary philosopher
said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
At the time, nobody was more professionally weird than
Howard Hughes. He had taken reclusion to a new level, utterly
withdrawing from contact with the public after revulsion from
dealing with the Washington swamp and the media. His company
still received royalties from every oil well drilled using his
drill bits, and his aerospace and technology companies were
plugged into the most secret ventures of the U.S. government.
Simply saying, “It's a Hughes project” was sufficient
to squelch most questions. This meant it had unlimited funds,
the sanction of the U.S. government (including three-letter
agencies whose names must not be spoken [brrrr!]),
and told pesky journalists they'd encounter a stone wall
from the centre of the Earth to the edge of the universe if they
tried to dig into details.
But covert as the project might be, aspects of its construction
and operation would unavoidably be in the public eye. You can't
build a 189 metre long, 51,000 tonne ship, the
Hughes
Glomar Explorer, with an 80 metre tall derrick
sticking up amidships, at a shipyard on the east coast of the
U.S., send it around Cape Horn to its base on the west coast
(the ship was too wide to pass through the Panama Canal),
without people noticing. A cover story was needed, and
the CIA and their contractors cooked up a doozy.
Large areas of the deep sea floor are covered by
manganese
nodules, concretions which form around a seed and
grow extremely slowly, but eventually reach the size of
potatoes or larger. Nodules are composed of around 30%
manganese, plus other valuable metals such as nickel,
copper, and cobalt. There are estimated to be more than
21 billion tonnes of manganese nodules on the deep ocean
floor (depths of 4000 to 6000 metres), and their
composition is richer than many of the ores from
which the metals they contain are usually extracted. Further,
they're just lying on the seabed. If you
could figure out how to go down there and scoop
them up, you wouldn't have to dig mines and process huge
amounts of rock. Finally, they were in international
waters, and despite attempts by kleptocratic dictators (some
in landlocked countries) and the international institutions
who support them to enact a “Law of the Sea”
treaty to pick the pockets of those who created the means
to use this resource, at the time the nodules were
just there for the taking—you didn't have to pay
kleptocratic dictators for mining rights or have your
profits skimmed by ever-so-enlightened democratic politicians
in developed countries.
So, the story was put out that Howard Hughes was setting out
to mine the nodules on the Pacific Ocean floor, and that
Glomar Explorer, built by Global Marine under
contract for Hughes (operating, of course, as a cut-out
for the CIA), would deploy a robotic mining barge called
the
Hughes
Mining Barge 1 (HMB-1)
which, lowered to the ocean floor, would collect nodules,
crush them, and send the slurry to the surface for processing
on the mother ship.
This solved a great number of potential problems. Global
Marine, as a public company, could simply (and truthfully)
report that it was building Glomar Explorer
under contract to Hughes, and had no participation in the
speculative and risky mining venture, which would have
invited scrutiny by Wall Street analysts and investors.
Hughes, operating as a proprietorship, was not required to
disclose the source of the funds it was paying Global
Marine. Everybody assumed the money was coming from
Howard Hughes' personal fortune, which he had invested, over
his career, in numerous risky ventures,
when in fact, he was simply passing through money from
a CIA black budget account. The HMB-1
was built by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company
under contract from Hughes. Lockheed was involved in
numerous classified U.S. government programs, so operating
in the same manner for the famously secretive Hughes
raised few eyebrows.
The barge, 99 metres in length, was built in a giant enclosed
hangar in the port of Redwood City, California, which shielded
it from the eyes of curious onlookers and Soviet reconnaissance
satellites passing overhead. This was essential, because a
glance at what was being built would have revealed that it
looked nothing like a mining barge but rather a giant
craw—sorry—claw! To install the claw on the
ship, it was towed, enclosed in its covered barge, to a location
near Catalina Island in southern California, where deeper water
allowed it to be sunk beneath the surface, and then lifted into
the well (“moon pool”) of Glomar
Explorer, all out of sight to onlookers.
So far, the project had located the target on the ocean floor,
designed and built a special ship and retrieval claw to seize
it, fabricated a cover story of a mining venture so persuasive
other mining companies were beginning to explore launching their
own seabed mining projects, and evaded scrutiny by the press,
Congress, and Soviet intelligence assets. But these are
pussycats compared to the California Tax Nazis! After the first
test of mating the claw to the ship, Glomar
Explorer took to the ocean to, it was said, test the
stabilisation system which would keep the derrick vertical as
the ship pitched and rolled in the sea. Actually, the purpose
of the voyage was to get the ship out of U.S. territorial waters
on March 1st, the day California assessed a special inventory
tax on all commercial vessels in state waters. This would not
only cost a lot of money, it would force disclosure of the value
of the ship, which could be difficult to reconcile with its
cover mission. Similar fast footwork was required when Hughes
took official ownership of the vessel from Global Marine after
acceptance. A trip outside U.S. territorial waters was also
required to get off the hook for the 7% sales tax California
would otherwise charge on the transfer of ownership.
Finally, in June 1974, all was ready, and Glomar
Explorer with HMB-1 attached set sail
from Long Beach, California to the site of K-129's
wreck, arriving on site on the Fourth of July, only
to encounter foul weather. Opening the sea doors in the
well in the centre of the ship and undocking the claw
required calm seas, and it wasn't until July 18th that
they were ready to begin the main mission. Just at that
moment, what should show up but a Soviet missile tracking
ship. After sending its helicopter to inspect
Explorer, it eventually departed. This wasn't
the last of the troubles with pesky Soviets.
On July 21, the recovery operation began, slowly
lowering the claw on its string of pipes. Just at
this moment, another Soviet ship arrived, a
47 metre ocean-going tug called SB-10. This tug would
continue to harass the recovery operation for days,
approaching on an apparent collision course and then
veering off. (Glomar Explorer could not
move during the retrieval operation, being required to use
its thrusters to maintain its position directly above
the wrecked submarine on the bottom.)
On August 3, the claw reached the bottom and its television
cameras revealed it was precisely on target—there was the
submarine, just as it had been photographed by the
Halibut six years earlier. The claw gripped
the larger part of the wreck, its tines closed under it,
and a combination of pistons driving against the ocean
bottom and the lift system pulling on the pipe from the
ship freed the submarine from the bottom. Now the long lift
could begin.
Everything had worked. The claw had been lowered, found its
target on the first try, successfully seized it despite the
ocean bottom's being much harder than expected, freed it
from the bottom, and the ship had then successfully begun
to lift the 6.4 million kg of pipe, claw, and submarine back
toward the surface. Within the first day of the lift, more
than a third of the way to the surface, with the load on the
heavy lift equipment diminishing by 15 tonnes as each segment
of lift pipe was removed from the string, a shudder went through
the ship and the heavy lift equipment lurched violently.
Something had gone wrong, seriously wrong. Examination of
television images from the claw revealed that several of the
tines gripping the hull of the submarine had failed and
part of the sub, maybe more than half, had broken off and
fallen back toward the abyss. (It was later decided that
the cause of the failure was that the tines had been
fabricated from
maraging
steel, which is very strong but brittle, rather than a
more ductile alloy which would bend under stress but not
break.)
After consultation with CIA headquarters, it was decided to
continue the lift and recover whatever was left in the claw.
(With some of the tines broken and the mechanism used to
break the load free of the ocean floor left on the bottom,
it would have been impossible to return and recover the
lost part of the sub on this mission.) On August 6th, the
claw and its precious payload reached the ship and entered
the moon pool in its centre. Coincidentally, the Soviet
tug departed the scene the same day. Now it was possible
to assess what had been recovered, and the news was not
good: two thirds of the sub had been lost, including
the ballistic missile tubes and the code room. Only the
front third was in the claw. Further, radiation five times
greater than background was detected even outside the
hull—those exploring it would have to proceed
carefully.
An “exploitation team” composed of CIA specialists
and volunteers from the ship's crew began to explore the
wreckage, photographing and documenting every part recovered.
They found the bodies of six Soviet sailors and assorted human
remains which could not be identified; all went to the ship's
morgue. Given that the bow portion of the submarine had been
recovered, it is likely that one or more of its torpedoes
equipped with nuclear warheads were recovered, but to this day
the details of what was found in the wreck remain secret. By
early September, the exploitation was complete and the bulk of
the recovered hull, less what had been removed and sent for
analysis, was dumped in the deep ocean 160 km south of Hawaii.
One somber task remained. On September 4, 1974, the
remains of the six recovered crewmen and the unidentified
human remains were buried at sea in accordance with
Soviet Navy tradition. A video tape of this ceremony was
made and, in 1992, a copy was presented to Russian
President Boris Yeltsin by then CIA director Robert Gates.
The partial success encouraged some in the CIA to mount a
follow-up mission to recover the rest of the sub, including
the missiles and code room. After all, they knew precisely
where it was, had a ship in hand, fully paid for, which had
successfully lowered the claw to the bottom and returned
to the surface with part of the sub, and they knew what
had gone wrong with the claw and how to fix it. The effort
was even given a name, Project Matador. But it was not to
be.
Over the five years of the project there had been leaks to
the press and reporters sniffing on the trail of the story
but the CIA had been able to avert disclosure by contacting
the reporters directly, explaining the importance of the
mission and need for secrecy, and offering them an
exclusive of full disclosure and permission to publish
it before the project was officially declassified for the
general public. This had kept a lid on the secret throughout
the entire development process and the retrieval and
analysis, but this all came to an end in March 1975 when
Jack
Anderson got wind of the story. There was no love lost
between Anderson and what we now call the Deep State.
Anderson believed the First Amendment was divinely
inspired and absolute, while J. Edgar Hoover had called Anderson
“lower than the regurgitated filth of
vultures”. Further, this was a quintessential Jack
Anderson story—based upon his sources, he presented
Project Azorian as a US$ 350 million failure which had produced
no useful intelligence information and was being kept secret
only to cover up the squandering of taxpayers' money.
CIA Director William Colby offered Anderson the same deal
other journalists had accepted, but was flatly turned down.
Five minutes before Anderson went on the radio to break the
story, Colby was still pleading with him to remain silent.
On March 18, 1975, Anderson broke the story on his Mutual
Radio Network show and, the next day, published additional
details in his nationally syndicated newspaper column.
Realising the cover had been blown, Colby called all of the
reporters who had agreed to hold the story to give them the
green light to publish. Seymour Hersh of the New York
Times had his story ready to go, and it ran on the
front page of the next day's paper, providing far more detail
(albeit along with a few errors) than Anderson's disclosure.
Hersh revealed that he had been aware of the project since
1973 but had agreed to withhold publication in the interest
of national security.
The story led newspaper and broadcast news around the country
and effectively drove a stake through any plans to mount a
follow-up retrieval mission. On June 16, 1975, Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger made a formal recommendation to
president Gerald Ford to terminate the project and that
was the end of it. The Soviets had communicated through a
back channel that they had no intention of permitting a
second retrieval attempt and they had maintained an ocean-going
tug on site to monitor any activity since shortly after the
story broke in the U.S.
The CIA's official reaction to all the publicity was what has
come to be called the “Glomar
Response”: “We can neither confirm nor can we
deny.” And that is where things stand more that four
decades after the retrieval attempt. Although many of those
involved in the project have spoken informally about aspects of
it, there has never been an official report on precisely what
was recovered or what was learned from it. Some CIA veterans
have said, off the record, that much more was learned from the
recovered material than has been suggested in press reports,
with a few arguing that the entire large portion of the sub was
recovered and the story about losing much of it was a cover
story. (But if this was the case, the whole plan to mount a
second retrieval mission and the substantial expense repairing
and upgrading the claw for the attempt, which is well
documented, would also have to have been a costly cover story.)
What is certain is that Project Azorian was one of the most
daring intelligence exploits in history, carried out in total
secrecy under the eyes of the Soviets, and kept secret from an
inquiring press for five years by a cover story so persuasive
other mining companies bought it hook, line, and sinker. We may
never know all the details of the project, but from what we do
know it is a real-world thriller which equals or exceeds those
imagined by masters of the fictional genre.
September 2018 