Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (38 page)

Colby then called the New York Times publisher and asked him to have Hersh "cool it down a little" on Jennifer. He also returned another call from Hersh, telling him, "You've been first-class about this for a long time."

But the flattery wasn't going to stop Hersh from digging into the story now, and other reporters were jumping on it as well. So Colby crafted a desperate plan, one that was unprecedented in the annals of agency history. He decided to tell dozens of editors and publishers, broadcasters and producers, about Project Jennifer, to give them some details. But his offering carried a price. The editors in turn were being asked to hold the story back. Colby made one last concession: if it looked as though anyone was going to break the embargo, he would call all the others and give them the go-ahead to publish.

He knew full well that keeping Jennifer out of the papers would be about as easy as forcing a lid on a boiling pot. He began describing himself as the center of "the weirdest conspiracy in town."

That's not to say Colby trusted his co-conspirators. The CIA began to monitor some of the reporters who were working on the story. Agents secretly recorded their conversations with journalists, investigated their backgrounds, and rated their performances. There were dozens of secret files. One unidentified West Coast reporter-code-named E-14-was deemed a "journalistic prostitute" and "a heavy drinker."

But above all others, Colby and crew were watching Hersh. They tracked who he talked to on a trip to the West Coast, helped by the fact that many of the people he tried to interview reported straight back to Colby. Among the people Hersh contacted was John Craven, who was now teaching at the University of Hawaii. Although Craven's dreams of building a fleet of small deep-submergence search vehicles had been swamped by the enormous cost of the Glomar Explorer, he wasn't about to cough up the secret. "Project what?" Craven answered when Hersh told him what he was chasing.

Still, Craven agreed to meet Hersh a week later at the ornate Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. The undersecretary of the Navy urged Craven to try to find out who Hersh's sources were, but by the time they got together, fencing and blustering over cocktails, neither man gave up much. It was clear that Hersh had the story in hand whether Craven gave him any help or not.

Finally, on March 18, syndicated investigative columnist Jack Anderson declared an end to the intrigue and prepared to air the story during his show on the Mutual Radio Network. Colby rushed in, but Anderson refused to reconsider.

"I don't think the government has a right to cover up a boondoggle," he said later. "I have withheld other stories at the behest of the CIA, but this was simply a cover-up of a $350 million failure-$350 million literally went down into the ocean." (Government officials later put the cost at more than $500 million.)

The story was out, and Hersh finally got to publish his much-fuller account of Project Jennifer in the next day's New York Times. It ran with a five-column, three-line headline: "CIA Salvage Ship Brought up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles." The banner treatment of the word Failed was enough to make Colby cringe, and the story's lead probably didn't make him feel any better: "The Central Intelligence Agency financed the construction of a multimillion-dollar deep-sea salvage vessel and used it in an unsuccessful effort last summer to recover hydrogen-warhead missiles and codes from a sunken Soviet submarine in the Pacific Ocean, according to high Government officials." Hersh went on to note that the CIA recovered only an insignificant forward chunk of the Golf, and he summed up the assessment of unnamed critics, saying that the possibility of retrieving "outmoded code books and outmoded missiles did not justify either the high cost of the operation or its potential for jeopardizing the United States-Soviet detente."

Overall, the story was a picture of waste, not heroics, and one that some naval officers quietly applauded. The CIA had, after all, been trying to swim in their waters, had stolen their prized find, and had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Project Jennifer was a bust, and in the Navy's eyes, it was also a downright foolish mission to begin with.

Hersh mistakenly wrote that as many as seventy bodies had been recovered in the wreckage, when only six were recovered. But he did also echo one of the points that Colby had been most intent on making, that the CIA had held a burial service for the Soviet dead and videotaped it in case the Soviet Union ever found out about the recovery attempt and demanded information.

Colby himself had stopped talking altogether, rationalizing his belated silence as the only way to prevent the Soviets from being forced into a public reaction. He made that point at a visit to the White House. Toting a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's Memoirs, he showed President Ford where Khrushchev wrote that he had been forced to feign public outrage and cancel a summit meeting in 1960 when Eisenhower openly admitted that the U-2s flying over the Soviet Union were spy planes and not simply weather planes blown off course.

Not wanting to repeat Eisenhower's "error," the Ford administration met all further queries about Glomar with a strict "no comment." That was exactly what the Soviets wanted. They began sending frantic backchannel messages through any contacts they had, begging for U.S. silence-anything to keep the story from Soviet citizens who were still in the dark.`
One Soviet naval attache approached a U.S. Navy captain at a party and offered a deal: if the U.S. didn't raise the issue again publicly, the Soviets wouldn't either. Kissinger was having similar conversations as he quietly arranged damage control, among other things promising Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the CIA would drop its plans for a second recovery attempt. Kissinger also gave Dobrynin the names of three young submariners whose metal dog tags had been recovered amid parts of the six bodies in the salvage attempt.

With that, the Soviets seemed to let the matter drop, and in the end Colby's silence left so much mystery surrounding Project Jennifer that myth and reality blurred. The U.S. government had given the Soviets more detailed information than it gave the American public, leaving the press to fill the gap with wildly inaccurate accounts of Glomar's expedition.

Nearly every newspaper and magazine reported that the United States had recovered the forward third of the 300-foot-long sub. But former Navy officials say that only a 38-foot piece was brought to the surface. Among the initial newspaper accounts, there was also confusion about what type of submarine had been lost. The CIA and other government sources had been unwilling to admit that the target of the whole venture was an antiquated diesel boat. The CIA also clearly leaked misinformation about the Golf's location, telling reporters that the operation had taken place 750 miles northwest of Hawaii when it was really about 1,700 miles away. This probably was done in an effort to throw the Soviets off track.

Ultimately, it seems the agency even convinced some reporters that Project Jennifer had been at least moderately successful, at least judging from some later articles.

Still, the episode created a huge debate among journalists over whether Colby's efforts to quash the story marked one of those moments when the phrase "national security" was used not to save national secrets, but national embarrassment. If anything, Colby's gambit left most journalists increasingly skeptical about acquiescing to requests by intelligence officials to hold back on such stories. Indeed, most reporters wrote that Project Jennifer was a huge failure and that the CIA had gone to great lengths to hide that.

Had the press known the full truth, it would have lambasted the CIA even more. In recent interviews with former top Navy officials, it has become clear that the CIA got away with its most glaring omission of all: the fact that Colby's much-touted plan for a second recovery attempt had been ludicrous from its inception.

In late 1974, several months before Colby's scramble to save the Glomar secret for a second try, the Navy had sent the USS Seawolf back to the Golf's grave site. Seawolf had just been converted to join Halibut as a second "special projects" submarine. Using electronic "fish" to carry cameras down to the lost sub, Seawolf had collected photographs that showed the Golf had shattered after Glomar dropped it and lay in tiny unidentifiable pieces, a vast mosaic decorating the sand.

"It dissolved just like that, like an Alka-Seltzer in water," one former high-ranking naval officer says. "It spread all over acres on the ocean floor." Said another former Navy official: "It shattered. The judgment was made that there was no possibility to recover anything more."

These men say that there was almost no chance of finding relatively small items like warheads, code machines, and antennas. And the officers were amazed that the CIA didn't seem to recognize that. Among the Navy men who stood out as critics of the second recovery effort were Captain Bradley, who, though retired, was a consultant to NURO, and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had become the director of Naval Intelligence in September 1974.

But the CIA had pushed the project forward nonetheless. The agency's only apparent concession to the Golf's condition was to replace some of the Glomar's grasping claws with a huge scoop. The CIA was hoping to blindly sweep up something significant among the broken pieces.

Colby told none of this to the newspaper editors. All he said was that, given a second chance, the CIA could have recovered the submarine, or at least important chunks of the conning tower and missile bay. Later, Colby said that he didn't remember ever examining the Seawolf photographs himself and that he was relying instead on the analysis of his technical experts.

"We were all very convinced that if we could get back we could get something," Colby said. "Otherwise, why the hell go for it? It wouldn't have made any sense."

What he may have failed to take into account was that his experts were far from objective. They had spent years on Project Jennifer, had been responsible for its huge cost, and in the end they could easily have been more concerned about their professional lives than the lives of the Glomar crewmen. Colby himself knew that the CIA couldn't afford another embarrassment, not when it was suffering politically from other disclosures.

Carl Duckett, the CIA's chief official on the Glomar project, has died, leaving his views on the odds of success for the second phase of Project Jennifer a mystery. CIA records on Project Jennifer are still classified. And Duckett's top deputy, Zeke Zelmer, has refused to discuss the matter. Colby died in 1996, but insisted to the end that a second recovery attempt could have been profitable.

But the former Navy officers believe that the CIA officials were desperate to believe their own myth, desperate to believe that victory was still possible and they had not wasted so much money.

Craven's theory is far more blunt. "It was just a big, fat plum that looked juicy," he says. "And they turned loose some guys who as far as the ocean was concerned were a bunch of amateurs."

About that, Hersh agreed with Craven. His already well-honed cynicism sharpened, Hersh began digging into the Navy's regular submarine operations, and in May 1975 he published an account of Holystone, of submarine trailing and surveillance missions taking place in or near Soviet waters.

Hersh also revealed that there had been a number of collisions between U.S. and Soviet subs, that a U.S. spy sub had once grounded briefly in the approaches to Vladivostok harbor and that some White House and CIA officials were questioning whether the flood of U.S. submarines in Soviet waters made sense in the age of detente. After his story appeared, he received a call from a man who had been on Gato during its collision with the Soviet Hotel in 1969, and Hersh published an account of that in early July. By this time, Congress was looking into intelligence abuses. The Senate, led by Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, was investigating incidents included in a CIA document that catalogued its own abuses-from domestic spying to international assassination attempts. Church had already unnerved the once-proud and untouchable agency, calling it "a rogue elephant."

But the intelligence community was more worried about an investigation in the House, where a New York Democrat, Otis G. Pike, was leading his own broader investigation, looking at Kissinger, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and the Navy. He also was setting out to gauge the value of the Navy's submarine spying efforts-something no other congressman had attempted in the thirty years since the cold war began.

Pike, fifty-three, was a maverick and a jokester, but more important, he was cheap. He always wore old suits in various stages of disrepair, usually serious disrepair. And he was a man who years earlier had speared the Navy for gross overspending in cartoonish depictions of admirals collecting hazard flight pay for the dangers they encountered sitting at their desks. It was Pike's investigating that led to the running jokes about toilet seats and wrenches that cost the military hundreds of dollars. When he took over the House investigation into intelligence activities, the press touted him as the consummate outsider, despite the fact that he was a product of Princeton University and Columbia University School of Law, a longtime member of the House Armed Services Committee, and a Marine war hero.

Pike was now promising that in just six months he would scrutinize cold war spying. For the submarine force, that meant Pike was threatening to poke into trailings, incursions into foreign territorial waters, and collisions. The Navy was worried that he would publicize its most classified missions. After all, he had led the House investigation into the Pueblo fiasco, determining that a gross lack of analysis and oversight was responsible for placing the spy ship in harm's way off the coast of North Korea.