Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (36 page)

This was to be the final leg of their trip. Their orders were to collect every last hit of information they could, then leave behind the tap to silently record the Soviets through the months that would pass before Halibut could again make the long trip back to Okhotsk. They hovered over the cable for a week, maybe more, long enough for even White's dramatic exit to become blurred into the general monotony of watch, meals, poker, sleep, watch, meals, poker, sleep. By now, the sub had been out for nearly five months, and most of the men just wanted to start their crawl home.

Then, abruptly, their routine was broken. A storm above began boiling beneath the surface. The divers were trapped outside, unable to climb back into the DSRV chamber as Halibut strained against her anchors one moment and slammed into the seafloor the next. All the men could do was try to keep a safe distance and watch.

There was no way the officers and crew manning the diving planes could keep Halibut level. The gauge measuring anchor tension moved from 10,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds to zero to 20,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds and back to zero again. An hour passed, then another. Then there was a loud crunch. Both steel anchors snapped at once, broke so easily that they could have been rubber bands.

Outside, the divers watched as Halibut began to drift upward. The men were still linked to the submarine through their air hoses. They knew that they would die if Halibut pulled them up before they could decompress. If they cut themselves loose, they would suffocate. Inside, the officer of the deck was well aware of the danger when he shouted a desperate order: "Flood it!"

He said it a second time. Valves were rolled wide open, and Halibut began to take in tons of water, filling her ballast tanks in a matter of seconds. Belly first, she crashed into the sand. The divers scrambled into the DSRV chamber.

The horrendous ride was over. But there was no guarantee the submarine would ever be able to break free of the muddy sand. Rocks scraped against and past the hull, an ongoing crunch, until the men on board were certain the barrage would wreck their boat, that they would never leave Okhotsk.

"Christ, we're here forever," one mechanic said through gritted teeth.

"Hell, we weren't supposed to be here in the first place," another man muttered.

Halibut sat, one day leading into another. The storm passed, but McNish wouldn't try to raise the boat until he had milked the cable for everything he could record. He and his crew were going to go home with their tapes full, if they went home at all. When McNish finally gave the word, one good emergency blow freed Halibut from the bottom.

She had an entirely uneventful trip across the Pacific. The response to her return, however, was anything but uneventful. Bradley got the word from the NSA almost immediately. The tap had recorded as many as twenty lines at once. The NSA had been able to separate all of them electronically. Halibut had hit the mother lode. There were conversations between Soviet field commanders covering operational tactics and plans and maintenance problems, including defects that could cause missile submarines-like the Yankees, which were now beginning to patrol in the Pacific-to make noises that might help U.S. submarines in their efforts to track the enemy. Logistical business was conducted through the line, reports that ships couldn't get under way for lack of spare parts. There was also other high-level reporting of command and control, decisions made about when and if patrols would get under way, and which submarines would be sent to lurk off of U.S. shores.

There were discussions of personnel problems, training problems, requests for more men, complaints when those men failed to arrive at Petropavlovsk. Then there were the intangibles: the dreaded political officers on Soviet submarines revealing their own private views about party leaders. The Soviet command also allowed young submariners to use the lines, patching their calls through to local stations where the men could wish Mama a happy birthday or ask their sweetheart to wait. All this put a human face on the massive enemy across the ocean.

This second effort to tap the cable confirmed one disappointment. There seemed to be little if any information about missile tests running through the line-Bradley had had great hopes that there would he information about the success of splashdowns of land- and seabased intercontinental ballistic missiles. But overall, the tap was an intelligence gold mine.

Nevertheless, there would have to be a few changes. Bell Laboratories was asked to find a way to program the next tap pod so that it could hone in on what were deemed the most crucial lines, and so the recorders could turn on and shut off to conserve tape. The idea was to program the tap for prime time, although at this stage no one at the NSA was really sure what constituted prime time, any more than they knew for certain which lines were best.

Bradley's office also had to let Rickover in on the program, at least in a limited way, despite his rancor toward the boat and her previous commander. Bradley needed Rickover's permission to make an important structural change. The captain didn't want to risk another incident like the one that had almost killed Halibut's divers. She was going to get a pair of sleighlike feet. From now on, she would not anchor over the tap site. She'd be equipped to sit on the bottom when she went back to Okhotsk again in 1974 and 1975.

The details of Halibut's mechanics didn't interest the greater intelligence community, but the recordings did. The Navy had pulled the ultimate in one-upmanship. No human agent or standard spy boat could have collected the wealth of information that Halibut brought home.

The NSA bestowed a code name on what was now an ongoing operation: "Ivy Bells." Bradley would plan more of these missions, and other submarines would he refitted to follow Halibut's path to Okhotsk.

But Bradley would never know firsthand what his efforts had wrought. The NSA would give Naval Intelligence detailed summaries of the take, but unlike Halibut's chiefs, he would never hear a single minute of the tapes. The NSA decided that Bradley, who had imagined the cable, envisioned the signs pointing it out, and labored to get funding and clearances for the mission, hadn't earned this bit of currency. Bradley, it was deemed, simply had no need to listen, no need to know.

   It was October 22, 1973, and journalist Seymour M. Hersh was taking notes in a reporter's staccato, partial sentences-partial secrets that he ingested along with dinner as he sat in a suburban restaurant with a source whose name he was bound by ethics and bargain never to reveal.

At the moment, anyone would have expected this thirty-six-yearold Pulitzer Prize winner to have been entirely embroiled in Watergate. He was, after all, the top investigative reporter for the New York Times, albeit one who was rumpled and stubborn and given to bursts of profanity. And he was running a frustrated second to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post in the race to uncover the story that would make legends of these unknown, scruffy reporters and felons of their more polished and powerful targets.

Watergate scoops, however, were not what Hersh had come to this dinner for, and the man he was dining with did not belong to the group that soon would be branded "All the President's Men." This man ran in different company, in the company of spies, perhaps in "The Company," as the CIA was known. He had only recently stepped down from his post as a high-ranking national security official. He was, as Hersh put it, "somebody who sat at the cat-bird's seat for a long time," somebody who "knew everything."

More than that, Hersh would forever refuse to reveal. Indeed, he was taking considerable trouble to meet this man in secret, slipping out of the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Times to catch up with him in another city.

Hersh was making this trip because there was a story he wanted almost as much as the epic of a collapsing presidency. He had been getting tips for years about costly wastes and excessive dangers in U.S. intelligence operations, including some of the Navy's most secret submarine spy missions. Now he wanted to shine a light on this pitch black world that had always been left to operate under a peculiar type of political immunity that could only be imparted by the words "topsecret" and "highly classified."

These phrases had once been read by journalists and lawmakers as signals to back off and stop asking questions. But these days, the Watergate saga was emboldening the press and Congress, encouraging them to be more skeptical, and Hersh was at the forefront of a drive to hold the intelligence community accountable for what it had been doing behind the veil.

Much of what he had been hearing dealt with cost overruns on spy satellites and the risks being taken in undersea spy programs. He also had learned about the Holystone surveillance submarines that were darting into Soviet waters. And just recently, Hersh had started picking up scattered rumors about a CIA operation designed to steal something that the Soviets had lost or discarded at the bottom of an ocean. Three times he had been told that the agency was constructing an enormous barge that could reach down through miles of raging currents, crushing pressures, and unending darkness. He knew the plan only by its code name, "Project Jennifer."

The references were tantalizing, but oblique. None of his sources had been able or willing to tell Hersh just what the CIA was after. One government official had hinted that the agency was seeking pieces of spent ballistic missiles that had been fired in tests from the Tyuratam test center deep inside the Soviet Union into the Pacific, but Hersh didn't trust the information. He feared that the official was either offering up a guess or dangling deliberate misinformation.

Now, however, Hersh was meeting with a man he knew he could trust.

Appetizers were put on the table as new leads passed across. But it wasn't until the meal was ending that Hersh tossed out two words: as if offering up dessert, he repeated the code name that he had been unable to decipher: Project Jennifer.

Hersh waited, for a heartbeat, maybe ten, trying to look nonchalant. Then all at once he began scribbling, catching facts along with concern and skepticism as they poured from the man sitting across the dinner table.

"Russian sub went down in Atlantic," Hersh wrote. "Jennifer is designed to find it. We know where it is." Next came the words that revealed what may have been this source's reason for telling Hersh anything at all. "Don't you think the Russians know why there's a U.S. trawler with exotic gear out there in the middle of the ocean?"

Copying it all down, Hersh knew he now held the heart of what could be one of the most exotic undertakings of the cold war, an operation known to perhaps only a few dozen people in the government. The source didn't say how the CIA had found the submarine, and Hersh didn't realize until much later that his companion had placed the Soviet boat in the wrong ocean. But he had outlined what seemed to Hersh to he the perfect allegory, the perfect way to question what was wrong with U.S. intelligence. Here was a tale of an agency spinning a seemingly impossible dream that might antagonize the Soviets just as detente was starting to ease the worst of the cold war tensions. In fact, that very day the United States and the Soviet Union had jointly issued a call for a ceasefire in the Middle East war that had started on Yorn Kippur.

Hersh went back to his other sources, pushing and pleading. But his efforts still hadn't netted much information. Then, four months after the clandestine dinner, on a Saturday evening late in January 1974, Hersh got a break. He was at a Washington dinner party, one of those affairs where officials hobnob with journalists, both thinly disguising questions and evasions as small talk. This night Hersh was parrying with a newly retired CIA officer when his tendency toward swagger overwhelmed caution.

Smiling wryly, casting his voice with just the right amount of scorn, Hersh asked with the certainty of an insider why anyone would care about retrieving some old submarine from the bottom of the ocean. He made sure that he worked the name Jennifer into the sentence. Later, he would admit that he was probably showing off.

The former officer seemed not to react, offering not the slightest sign of annoyance, concern, or recognition. But Hersh had hit a nerve. He must have, because as soon as the party was over, the officer was on the telephone with William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA for only five months.

The news that Hersh had gotten hold of Project Jennifer hit the CIA with megaton force. Colby knew that Hersh had won his Pulitzer for breaking the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the director considered him "a good ferreter-outer." Colby also knew that after six years of planning and preparation, his secret was about to get out.

Contrary to what Hersh's source had said, the huge ship that had been commissioned for the project was not yet out to sea. But it had been completed, built by Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation. Christened the Glomar Explorer, she was the length of three football fields, with decks crammed with computer-operated equipment, pulleys, and cranes all designed to send a giant clawed arm diving through nearly 17,000 feet of ocean, down to the bottom where it was supposed to grab hold of the lost Soviet submarine and pull her to the surface. Only a few final tests remained before Glomar would be ready to set out on Project Jennifer. Five more months, and the CIA would be able to try its salvage attempt.

The idea had already survived the opposition of the men most responsible for finding the Golf in the first place, Captain James Bradley, who would he retiring in a month, and John Craven, who was already retired. Bradley and Craven still believed that the late 1950s-era Soviet boat was of little intelligence value and certainly not worth the cost and dubious chance of success involved in trying to pull her out of the ocean. Instead, they had proposed a far simpler and less dangerous plan to recover the Golf's most valuable treasures: develop unmanned submersibles equipped to blow holes in the Golf's hull and grab the missile warheads, communications gear, and decoding machines, just about the only things of any real value on the sub.