Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (37 page)

The wisdom behind their caution seemed even clearer now. The Soviets barely relied on the Golfs anymore. They were nearly finished building a fleet of thirty-four Yankees, and they were about to introduce the even more lethal Delta missile subs. The first Deltas, already on sea trials, were slated to head out on patrol in 1974-and two to three dozen more were planned. The Deltas carried missiles that could travel 4,200 nautical miles, or nearly six times as far as the antiquated ones sitting in the Golf's wreckage.

Bradley and other Naval Intelligence officials also felt that the sub force was finally starting to get a handle on tracking Soviet subs at sea, and they saw no need for any desperate moves. Two or three Yankees were always in the Atlantic now, and SOSUS had been calibrated well enough to pick them up as they moved in round-robin fashion through patrol zones, known as the "Yankee boxes," southeast of Bermuda and west of the Azores. Indeed, more SOSUS stations were being set up, and U.S. warships were now towing portable sonar arrays to cover areas where SOSUS was deaf. Naval Intelligence also had created "operational intelligence" centers on both coasts and in Europe and Japan, which were correlating all the data coming in on Soviet sub movements and disseminating daily updates. During the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, the United States had managed to keep close tabs on twenty-six Soviet missile and attack subs in the Mediterranean, one U.S. attack sub handing off responsibility to another as they kept constant track of individual Soviet subs in the crowd.

But the CIA's elaborate plan to completely recover the Golf still appealed to Nixon and Kissinger, who was now secretary of State. They were so firmly behind the decision to grab the entire sub that final approvals were coming in right on schedule. Several top congressional leaders also had been briefed.

It was somewhat remarkable that the secret ever had survived the years it had taken to build the massive Glornar Explorer. Now the ship was well hidden in plain sight, shrouded by a cover story the CIA considered perfect: the country's most famous and wealthy eccentric was building Glomar to corner the market on manganese nodules, golfball-sized clumps of minerals that sat on the ocean floor. The venture, as promoted, was expensive, and there were far simpler ways to obtain manganese. But nobody questioned that Hughes would take huge risks to control a new market. Nor did anyone seemed surprised about the secrecy surrounding the project. Hughes was a well-known paranoid, and secrecy had marked his huge empires in aviation, oildrilling, and hotels.

But Hersh had never heard the cover story, had leapfrogged it altogether with one crucial interview. Colby, who was known for a nearlegendary calm under pressure, was becoming very nervous. A story in the papers could kill the entire mission before the Glomar Explorer ever embarked.

CIA lawyers had, of course, crafted legal briefs outlining why the United States had every right in the world to try to salvage Soviet property in the middle of the ocean. But those briefs-like those crafted to adorn nearly every covert mission-were useful only for public deniability. With or without supporting legal arguments, Colby knew that international law made clear that sunken warships always belonged to the country that had sailed them.

Colby couldn't muzzle Hersh, not legally. But he could cajole. And that's just what he planned to do when he went to visit Hersh at the Times' Washington bureau.

Hersh and Colby were a generation and a war apart, and at this time, that was a gap galaxies wide. The fifty-four-year-old Colby had walked into the intelligence services during World War II, an era when journalists and novelists vied to craft the most romantic portraits of the nation's spies, of their daring and panache. Hersh, on the other hand, had been practically thrown out of the Pentagon as an Associated Press reporter during the Vietnam War for continuously and hostilely questioning the military's line.

Now Colby stood before Hersh, hoping to make a bargain. He had come to believe that the only way to maintain public support for intelligence efforts was by, as he would say, "bringing intelligence out of the shadows." For his part, Hersh thought Colby "essentially honest." He also believed that was probably a bad thing for a CIA director who had to deal with more hard-line agency veterans.

And so the two men sat down to talk. The director wanted Hersh to hold his story, to stop digging, to not even talk about Project Jennifer. Hersh listened to Colby knowing full well that he was far from ready to go to press. Nonetheless, there was an opportunity here: so Hersh said that he expected Watergate to keep him too occupied to go after Project Jennifer, at least for the next several months. After a hit of bluffing that suggested he knew more about Project Jennifer than he did, Hersh redirected the conversation. Hersh wanted to know about CIA ties to Watergate.

Colby happily answered Hersh's questions, and he left the Tines convinced that he had bought at least two or three months of quiet. Indeed, Hersh was still absorbed in the president's scandal when Glomar left port five months later, and the reporter was still writing about Watergate when she hovered over the Soviet submarine that July in a spot in the Pacific about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii.

It seemed obvious to Colby that his secret was holding. Over the next weeks, he received reports that the only Soviet ships that passed anywhere near Glomar were commercial vessels. Still, many of Glomar's crew members feared the Soviets would figure out what was going on. Most of Glomar's men were roughnecks, recruited from U.S. oil fields, chosen because they could handle Glomar's massive crane and other equipment. None of the men wanted an encounter with the Soviets. The men wanted to get the job done and go home.

New photographs, taken by cameras dangled by Glomar, showed that the Golf was still in much the same condition as when Halibut had found her six years earlier. The Soviet sub was listing toward starboard. Photos taken through missing and damaged hatches made it clear that there was still one intact nuclear missile. The other two had been damaged when the submarine went down.

Except for a hole blown nearly 10 feet wide just behind the conning tower, probably from the explosion that had sunk her, the Golf appeared to be in one piece. Still, there was a good possibility she was fragile. The Navy had estimated that the Golf had slammed to the ocean bottom at as much as 200 knots. That kind of impact could easily have left her broken beneath the steel outer plating. That was one of the key reasons Bradley and Craven had pushed for a more limited recovery effort.

But at that moment, the biggest hurdle was reaching the submarine in the first place. It was a task that one man who recruited Glomar's crew compared to lifting a 25-foot-long steel tube off the ground with a cable lowered from the top of the 110-story World Trade Center, on a pitch-black night haunted by swirling winds.

Computers in the Glomar's control room began flashing information as the giant claw was slowly lowered into the depths. The claw and its steel arm had been nicknamed "Clementine," after the classic miner's lament. Indeed, at least the Soviets believed their boat to be "lost and gone forever."

The arm resembled a huge octopus that would ultimately dangle on a miles-long tether. It had eight grasping claws, three of which supported a huge steel net. The tether itself was being built a piece at a time by Glomar's men who linked sections of pipe, each 60 feet long, one by one, giant tinker toys, creating an ever-lengthening leash dangling ever lower into the ocean. Later, when it was time to try to raise the submarine, crewmen would hoist the claw and the sub by pulling the pieces of pipe from the ocean, dismantling the tether one section at a time.

It took days to lower Clementine to the bottom, days before the grasping claws were hovering directly over the submarine. Then, when the tether was three miles long, Glomar's men and computers labored to compensate for the swirling current so that they could drape the steel net held by three of the claws over the Golf's conning tower. Finally, when cameras showed one of the grasping claws in contact with the sub, the men tried to maneuver the arm closer so the remaining claws could reach around and grab.

But the men miscalculated, sending Clementine crashing into the seabed. They backed the arm part way up, studying the images sent back to the ship. In the murky, partially lit ocean, the arm looked amazingly intact, as though it could still grab. They decided to send Clementine back for another try.

Again they aimed, and again they sent the steel net falling over the conning tower. This time all five claws were in position. It seemed as though Gloinar was going to be able to reel in its catch after all.

Six feet a minute. That was how fast the Golf was pulled toward the surface, 5,000 tons of waterlogged steel. Glomar began to sink deeper into the water against the pull, and then began bucking under the strain. Conversation among the crew shifted from talk of capture to capsizing.

Nine hours passed, and the Golf was 3,000 feet off the seabed. More time, and the submarine was 5,000 feet off the ocean floor, 2 miles away from the surface. Another minute promised to bring another 6 feet of progress. Instead, it brought the wrenching realization that the Golf would never rise any higher.

With one jerk, three of the grasping claws cracked and fell away. They had probably been damaged by the crash into the ocean floor so many hours ago. Now, there were only two claws and the net left holding the forward section of the Golf. The rest of the submarine was dangling mid-ocean, and within moments proved itself just as fragile as Bradley and Craven had predicted six years earlier. The steel of the Golf began to tear at its seams, until the bulk of the sub ripped free from the small section still in Clementine's grasp and fell back into the depths. Back to the ocean floor went the intact nuclear missile, the codebooks, the decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim.

There were no celebrations as the Glomar headed home, no sense of victory that she carried back about 10 percent of a Soviet submarine. Most of this portion was nearly useless from an intelligence standpoint.

Glomar was still out at sea on August 8 when a report came over the radio: Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Air Force One flew Nixon back to San Clemente, California, for the last time, and much of the crew of this, what was perhaps the last top-secret mission he had sanctioned, blamed his demise on the "damned media."

Back in Washington, the political storm that had so engulfed Hersh abated with Nixon's departure. Hersh had heard nothing of Glomar's attempt, nor of its failure. Nor was he alerted when the CIA's underwater experts began plotting a second try for the sunken Golf. But with Nixon out of the White House, Hersh was back on the intelligence heat. That December, he published a huge expose on the front page of the Times, charging that the CIA had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation," compiling dossiers on ten thousand or more American citizens. CIA operatives, the story said, had been shadowing war protesters and infiltrating antiwar organizations.

The CIA would never fully recover from the charges. Hersh's story set off a wave of public and congressional condemnation and scrutiny. In an effort to keep the inevitable investigations in friendly hands, the new president, Gerald Ford, created a blue ribbon commission to examine Hersh's charges. This time, however, younger members of Congress pushed past the old guard who had always shielded the CIA and insisted that the House and the Senate conduct investigations of their own.

Colby and Hersh were still enmeshed with the fallout from the domestic spying story when Project Jennifer popped back to the surface. It happened on Friday afternoon, February 7, 1975. The early edition of the next day's Los Angeles Times hit the streets screaming news of the recovery attempt in a banner headline splayed across page 1: "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA, Hughes Told."

After holding on to the story for nearly a year, Hersh had been scooped. The Los Angeles Times story had mistakes-it said the sunken sub was in the Atlantic-and gave only limited details. Still, as far as Hersh was concerned, the story was out, and he saw no reason not to step in and finally publish a full account. Colby was just as determined to stop him.

For Colby, the stakes were still huge. Unknown to Hersh, Project .Jennifer was far from over. The CIA was moving ahead with plans for a second recovery attempt. After the first awful failure, CIA technical experts had convinced Colby that the Glomar Explorer could still reach down and steal crucial pieces of the Golf. The Hughes ship was already being refitted and repaired, and the second try was scheduled for that summer. To Colby, it seemed as if he were right back where he had started with Hersh a year earlier.

Colby believed that if the matter died quickly, the Soviets might miss the Los Angeles Times story altogether. But if the article began to get attention, or if Hersh stepped in now with a better rendition of the facts, perhaps with the actual location of the Golf, Colby would have to halt the operation and the agency would have to shoulder another fiasco, one with a huge price tag.

The CIA immediately sent two agents to see the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Their message was simple: Jennifer was not over and publicity could make it impossible for the CIA to bring home the big catch. Neither agent said that there had already been one dismal failure. Nor did they specifically say that plans were afoot for a second attempt. But the editor wasn't asking too many questions-he just agreed to bury the Glomar story on page 18 in the paper's final editions and promised not to run any follow-ups, at least not for the time being.