Red Star Rogue (32 page)

I
N HINDSIGHT
,
THE QUESTION
might be: “When is a leak not a leak?” And the answer: “When it’s a plant.”

In that regard, a denial that the CIA schemed to plant false information in the American press was published later in Director Colby’s autobiography. The indignant disclaimer sounds strangely like a gloat.

Director Colby wrote: “There have been a number of published postmortems on the
Glomar,
and the more prevalent of these were a measure of the disrepute to which the CIA had sunk at the time. For they tended to impute a deviously manipulative motive to my handling of the events. For example, there were those who were convinced that the
Glomar
project was completely successful and that then, in order to keep this a secret, I deliberately went around to all those newsmen to plant on them a false story that it wasn’t, fully aware that if I told enough people, the story was bound to leak eventually.”

In the love-hate, cat-and-mouse game between the news media and the intelligence community, that scenario and others like it are played out all the time. Colby’s denial is probably the most accurate account of what really did happen with the media in the Project Jennifer case.

By early 1975, Seymour Hersh of the
New York Times
and Daniel Schorr, who was with CBS, were getting substantial amounts of information from somewhere inside the intelligence community. Once again, a number of editors agreed not to run the story after Colby convinced them that to do so would jeopardize further intelligence gains from a second probe of the wreck site by the
Glomar Explorer.
But by then the story was too big and too widely known to be contained.

Congressmen began picking up on the impending media storm. But even in the face of severe congressional criticism, the CIA doggedly maintained that the mission had succeeded in raising only a small portion of the boat. The CIA was certain to be blamed for a half-billion-dollar failure and, for some unknown reason, it was willing to take the heat.

Finally, the cover was blown off Project Jennifer when radio and television commentator and exposé columnist Jack Anderson broke the story in full detail on March 18, 1975, seven years and a few days after K-129 blew up and sank off Hawaii. Colby had made a last-ditch effort to dissuade Anderson from going public with it. When Anderson refused to hold the story any longer, the CIA director called all the other news editors and released them from their commitments.

About his encounter with Colby, Anderson wrote: “I told him [Colby], ‘Look I have a record of killing stories that genuinely affect the security of the country. But are you trying to tell me that the Soviets don’t know what’s in their own submarine?’ ”

Anderson later criticized the media for agreeing with the CIA to hold the story for so long after it was clear the Soviets already knew about
Glomar Explorer
’s mission. The news media had learned that some information about the recovery effort had already been shared with the Soviets, even as the CIA tried to keep details from the American public.

“I was disappointed to see the reemergence of the pre-Watergate practice of cozy intimacy between press and government,” Anderson wrote. “It was a dubious ethic that allowed a camaraderie of secrets to be shared by the press peerage, but kept from the public.”

Anderson’s source had told him that only a part of the submarine had been recovered, but that seventy bodies were found in the forward section.

After the Anderson broadcast, a flood of front-page articles appeared in major newspapers across the country. All the majors seemed to have their own inside sources, but the leaked versions remained fairly consistent with the official CIA story. On March 19, the
New York Times
filled most of its front page with articles and photographs of the
Glomar Explorer,
the HMB-1 barge, and a Golf-type Soviet submarine. The
Washington Post,
likewise, carried its coverage on the front page for the next several days.

Moscow, which could have been expected to respond with a firestorm of angry protests and threats, now that the world had learned of their lost submarine and America’s recovery effort, was strangely quiet. Not only was there no response from the Kremlin or the Soviet military, but there was zero coverage about it for home consumption in
Pravda
and
Izvestia.

In the days before worldwide satellite TV broadcasts, it was an easy matter to keep such controversial information from the Soviet citizenry. The families of K-129 heard nothing about the Americans’ retrieval and honorable burial of some of their lost sailors’ remains.

An ironic incident involving Colby’s own autobiography, published three years later, in 1978, further suggests that a clever game with the truth was being played out at the time the story was leaked or planted.

It now appears Director Colby’s autobiography,
Honorable Men,
was used to reinforce the impression that the CIA was trying to keep the
Glomar Explorer
’s operation a secret and, at the same time, plant a story that the operation had largely failed. A description of the K-129 recovery was excised from the original American edition of Colby’s book by the CIA censor. A comparison of this English-language edition with the French edition, in which the passage was (mistakenly) not deleted, reveals that the information the CIA cut contained nothing more than what the Agency itself had already planted. But the CIA feigned outrage at the director’s leak.

The section of the book that the CIA excised from the American edition, but which later appeared in the French edition, entitled
William Colby: 30 Ans de C.I.A. (William Colby: 30 Years in the CIA),
reads in translation:

The charade continued, and in September 1981, the Reagan administration Justice Department filed a lawsuit against former director Colby.

“The Reagan administration means to serve notice that it will not tolerate security leaks or breaches of contracts between the federal government and its workers,” the
Washington Post
reported on September 20, 1981. “Colby’s alleged breach of security occurred when galley proofs reached a French publisher before the CIA could demand that certain passages be deleted.”

Although Colby was publicly chastised and fined thirty thousand dollars for the leak, the CIA had obviously pulled the ruse to reinforce the misinformation they wanted to plant on the Soviets and the American public in the first place. What was removed from the American edition was exactly the information that Colby had so eagerly planted on columnists, reporters, editors, and broadcast news directors in 1975, in actions obviously calculated and sanctioned by the Agency.

The larger unanswered question regarding the secrecy surrounding the K-129 is why intelligence officials still tried so hard to keep information from the public, long after some details were aired in the American press. The Russians obviously knew that at least part of their submarine and some of its secrets had been recovered. One reasonable explanation is that the well-publicized cover story was intentionally false, or at least incomplete. Perhaps some damning detail had not yet been discovered by the press and the government did not want the full story revealed.

All of the intrigue surrounding the incident will probably never be officially revealed, like so many other secrets of the Cold War. But investigative reporters and authors, and a few insiders brave enough to risk punishment for violating confidentiality contracts with the CIA, began to uncover and publicize pieces of the real story.

The first book published about the recovery was a well-documented description of the
Hughes Glomar Explorer.
Clyde W. Burleson, admittedly with the help of insiders in the CIA, wrote
The Jennifer Project.
Although the material in the book was detailed, and the operation apparently well described, there was no information leaked to that author or any of the others to follow regarding K-129’s sinister mission or true location of the sinking. When
Jennifer Project
was published in 1977, the CIA and Navy intelligence also withheld any mention of the USS
Halibut
’s role in finding K-129. Instead, the source for the information planted the story that the sub had been found and thoroughly investigated by the deep-sea research vessel
Mizar.

It was not until after the end of the Cold War that larger pieces of the story began to appear in print. Even then, the true intention of the rogue submarine’s crew was never hinted at by Navy or intelligence spokespersons who were providing bits and pieces of new information to reporters and authors.

At the height of the espionage operation surrounding K-129, very few officials were privy to the whole truth about the incident. Each piece of the top-secret operation was compartmentalized and revealed to persons working on carefully assigned parts of the whole, on a need-to-know basis only. Few participants who were, at the time, senior officials with knowledge of the whole story are still alive.

To this date, top-level officials from the Nixon administration who were apprised of all phases and secrets of the K-129 incident, the
Glomar,
and the uses of the resulting intelligence findings, have remained silent about the real purpose of Project Jennifer. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and DOD and CIA heads James R. Schlesinger and William Colby never hinted at the whole story in their writings. Richard Helms headed the CIA from 1966 to 1973, a period covering the K-129 incident and the initiation of Project Jennifer. In his memoir,
A Look over My Shoulder,
he freely discussed the assassinations planned by the CIA during his term, but did not reveal the secrets he carried about Nixon and the K-129 episode. Helms died in 2002, taking those secrets to the grave.

Certainly, no one has publicly admitted that the fruits of the clandestine operation were used to blackmail the Soviets into détente or to bribe Mao into opening up China to the West. Nevertheless, the K-129 incident and the strange Project Jennifer have been alluded to frequently as having some mysterious role in turning the tide of the Cold War.

A few retired Department of Navy officials and Navy officers have published some information or been interviewed and quoted on the technology and missions of many of America’s spy submarines during the Cold War. These admirals and Navy intelligence officers, however, were largely shut out of the larger story of K-129 after the CIA took control of the operation.

The story of the espionage role and deep-sea surveillance capabilities of U.S. naval forces, particularly submarines, was revealed for the first time in 1998. The best-selling, nonfiction book
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage,
by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew, revealed the thrilling and important role of U.S. naval underseas spy activities in winning the Cold War. That book covered some aspects of the K-129 sinking and parts of the recovery effort. For example, the world learned that K-129 was located by a spy sub, USS
Halibut,
and not by the surface research ship
Mizar,
as the Navy had claimed. Information leaked to the authors by intelligence sources, however, carefully maintained the cover stories about this mysterious episode in history.

Other revelations about the extensive amount of intelligence lifted from the wrecked Soviet submarine were made in William J. Broad’s book,
The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea,
published in 1997. Dr. John Piña Craven filled in additional pieces of the bigger puzzle in his autobiography,
The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea,
published in 2001. While Dr. Craven provided new insight into the K-129 incident, he and most of the other Navy men, civilian Defense Department personnel, and espionage agents are all sworn to a lifetime of confidentiality concerning their work in the Cold War. Any secrets about the story of the K-129 incident they may carry with them can never be told.