Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

Nine — The $500 Million Sand Castle

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 I 950s-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.

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 hack 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.

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.[12]

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 hack 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.

Perhaps another congressman would have planned such an ambitious investigation in oak-lined conference rooms or over scotch in one of Washington's private clubs, the kind that don't bother to put the prices on their menus. But Pike planned his investigation sitting in his skivvies over supermarket beer with Aaron B. Donner, his longtime campaign manager, in the small apartment near Capitol Hill that they shared as a Washington, D.C., residence since their families were still living in Long Island. They plotted strategy with the enthusiasm of students plotting their first campus demonstration. True to Pike's character, they decided that he would attack the nation's most powerful intelligence agencies with a cost-benefit analysis.

Pike's congressional committee was backed by a young staff, several of them fresh from the Watergate inquiry. They brought with them a deep distrust for the political establishment, for authority, and especially for anything stamped "secret." These staffers were irreverent. They were brazen. They were Pike's marauders.

They began asking questions: What do the intelligence agencies do? What do they cost taxpayers? How much use do they get out of the massive amount of information they collect? And weren't a lot of their risky and expensive ventures just plain redundant?

One of the most obvious places to start was Project Jennifer, which struck Pike as a massive failure at best, or an all-out boondoggle, a blank check written to the Howard Hughes corporations, perhaps even a political payoff. Had Craven been privy to Pike's hunches, he would have cheered. As Pike began digging, Colby tried the approach that had seemed to work so well with newspaper editors and that seemed to be working with the Senate. He offered up some details, enough, he hoped, to win over his critics. At a Pike hearing on Project Jennifer, Colby and company put on their best cloak and dagger for the occasion, insisting on a closed room for what was arguably the nation's worst-kept secret.

The congressmen were already in session in the Armed Services Committee hearing room when the CIA contingent arrived. First in was a small army of dour young men wearing dark suits and what looked like buttons in their ears-earphones for their walkie-talkies. They swept the room with electronic gear, searching for bugs in corners and under tables and chairs. Pike and the other congressmen watched transfixed by the living theater.

Then a second, smaller contingent of agents came in, carrying big black suitcases, the sort that museums use for transporting priceless figurines. These men also began to scout the room, though none of the congressmen could figure out what the agents were looking for. It was as though two acts had been staged to make the committee feel a sense of occasion. The effect was working.

Finally, in walked Colby and some of his deputies, triggering Act 3. The cases snapped open, and CIA men began gingerly to lift out large plastic bags, gently placing them on a long table set up before the congressmen. The committee members leaned forward and looked down, peering through the clear plastic at these top-secret items that had been carried here under guard.

A throat might have been cleared here and there, but for the most part the members were silent. Actually, nobody knew quite what to say. The objects laid out so ceremoniously on the table seemed to be nothing more than a collection of metal chunks that looked suspiciously like rusty iron.

The lawmakers examined the chunks, feigning reverence. Despite themselves, they had an overwhelming sense that something momentous was taking place as Colby solemnly announced that they were hefting pieces of a Russian submarine. It was only later that they admitted to one another that they could have been looking at anything, even refuse from a construction site down the street, and the CIA's presentation of charts and ocean diagrams seemed to hold just about as much significance. As for questions of cost and benefit, these Colby deftly evaded with vague explanations that totals were unavailable with most of the funding hidden in other, more mundane budgets. Colby's performance was masterful. By the time the show was over, not a single member of the committee had remembered to raise the question of Howard Hughes.

But the CIA's show left the congressmen with a lingering sense that they had been had. The feeling didn't go away when Colby later tried to impress the committee with a show of secret-agent gear, including what agents called a "micro-bio-inoculator," a device that looked like a gun but shot needles dipped in a drug that attacked the central nervous system. Pike's rebellious staff became outraged by the CIA's antics. If anything, the show put on to justify the Glomar Explorer left the staff more determined than ever to dig into a broad spectrum of submarine missions, and Pike's marauders began looking into the issues Hersh had raised in his stories about Holystone and the Gato collision.

Word quickly got around the Navy that Pike wasn't playing by the old rules, or any rules-that he was trying to take a hard look at the most secret operations. Some admirals were recommending that the Navy simply stonewall him. But a few submariners, veteran enlisted men, phoned the committee with stories about submarine groundings, falsified patrol reports, and news of another collision in which a Soviet submarine had been struck and was presumed lost.

The disclosures were unprecedented. Nothing in Pike's tenure on the Armed Services Committee had prepared him for any of this. Most members of that committee were told little about submarines, even about the basic surveillance ops. Before Watergate wrecked the old congressional seniority system and elevated some younger firebrands like Pike, the submarine community had been allowed to run past Congress. When a nod was needed, well, there was always a senator or two who could be counted on to push a program through-especially the late Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who single-handedly oversaw most intelligence programs in the I 960s. (Or as Admiral Moorer, who supported the Glomar operation as CNO and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1967 to 1974, put it: "Generally speaking, in the sixties, it was sufficient simply to tell Senator Russell that you were doing it, and no one else, and it never leaked.")

Things got really interesting when somebody phoned with a description of a submarine that could search deep, a submarine able to sit on a seafloor. It wasn't long before Pike's crew heard about the cable taps recording away beneath the Sea of Okhotsk.

The source was one of the Navy's handpicked elite, one of the men of the Halibut, and he was frightened. He was still in the Navy. He was still hound to secrecy. He was not supposed to be talking to anyone, certainly not a congressman known not only for kicking military tires but for pricing them, scrutinizing them, and complaining loudly and publicly when he found them to be flat. This was, for any submariner, a potentially career-crashing move.

Pike's staffers did what they could to reassure the man. They just asked him to point out what they should explore. The exploration, they promised, would occur through other means. They would confront the Pentagon directly. They saw no reason to haul some low-level guy up before a public committee, no reason to destroy an informant.

And so the submariner talked-of the Bat Cave, of Okhotsk. Then another man from special projects called. In the end, both submariners were actually looking for answers, much as Halibut's chiefs had been when White refused to get back on the sub in Guam. They wanted to know how invading Soviet waters and planting the telephone tap to end all telephone taps during talk of detente was going to accomplish anything. They wanted to know why they were being asked to sit as targets in a Soviet sea. They wanted to know whether the submarine command had become overzealous and reckless, whether their lives were being risked in patently illegal operations. They were sworn to go in harm's way. This they accepted. But they wanted to know, why these risks, why this mission? They especially wanted to know why they were being sent to a Soviet sea in two of the oldest and loudest submarines in the fleet. By this point in late 1975, Halibut had completed her last mission and was going to be taken out of service entirely. Seawolf, the boat taking Halibut's place, was turning out to be even more of a clunker.

As Pike's team began to follow up on these concerns, one of his most driven young staffers, Edward Roeder III, was assigned to take the lead. Admiral James L. Holloway III, who was now the chief of naval operations, countered with Inman, the director of Naval Intelligence.

Roeder was all of twenty-five years old, a former freelance journalist who was seen by the rest of Pike's staff as demanding and cantankerous and somewhat overzealous in his attempts at gaining information. Other staffers were apalled when he tried to date a secretary at the National Security Agency, hoping to get her to spill secrets over dinner or coffee-a maneuver that turned out to be a complete failure.

Still, Roeder was able to put a very human face on much of the mystery surrounding the high-tech undersea spy war, and even his critics believed he had come up with a shrewd explanation of how the secrets of decades had survived most of those moments when the United States and the Soviet Union caught one another in action. The way Roeder saw it, the United States and the Soviet Union were behaving much like two men in a smoke-filled room endlessly playing cards. Both of them were cheating, but neither was able to accuse the other because that would end the game.

Now Roeder had to figure out how to break through to a world where the U.S. Navy was protecting not only its own methods but its enemy's as well. What Roeder didn't figure on, however, was Bobby Inman. Inman had already decided to shock Pike and his staff with facts.

Inman was ignoring the pointed suggestions inside the Navy that he should remain silent, certain that wouldn't work. Just a couple of years before, he had served as an executive assistant to Holloway when he was the vice chief of Naval Operations. It was Inman's job to monitor Congress and the press. While there were few challenges to the sanctity of naval secrecy in those days, even the Navy had to suffer through budget hearings. He had watched as budgets were slashed after Hollywood-handsome admirals marched into hearings armed with cadres of assistants but few answers. On the other hand, he had also watched programs survive after being represented by overweight, unkempt, and gruff officers facing Congress sans entourages but with information and courtesy.

Now he approached Roeder and the rest of Pike's staff with little of the expected burnish of his brass. He didn't look or speak like any other admiral. Instead, he was plain, skinny, and decked out in hornrimmed glasses and a uniform with a collar so worn and oversized that the admiral's stars on his shoulders seemed out of place. Pike's staffers saw him as "kind of scary smart." But what surprised them more was that the head of Naval Intelligence seemed willing to cooperate. Inman had decided to head off any criticism or unwanted attention by giving Pike what he wanted, at least some of what he wanted. Inman wanted to hand Pike enough information to swing him around to the Navy's basic point of view: that submarine operations were providing critical information that could be obtained in no other way, and that they were actually saving lots of money by helping the Navy tailor its own construction programs to a well-defined Soviet threat.

With the CNO's blessings, Inman met Roeder with promises to research submarine collisions and groundings. Inman also said that he would look into the cable-tapping. There was a condition, though. Inman wanted guarantees that none of the information would leak. He insisted that the most sensitive documents be held in a safe, a so-called 20-minute safe, one that took that long to burn open with an acetylene torch. Roeder promised to use the safe and promised that only he would have the combination. But when he brought that demand to his bosses on Pike's staff, they told him that no such safe was available. They also quickly determined that Roeder had become a little full of himself. In a grand gesture, perhaps out of honor, perhaps out of selfimportance, Roeder quit over the issue, certain that Inman would know he had walked out in the name of national security.

The gesture did impress the admiral, but not enough for him to give up his effort to win over Pike and crew. Instead, Inman simply turned his brand of open and honest charm on Pike and the rest of his staff. They met several times in the committee's inner sanctum, a windowless room that staffers called the "Cone of Silence" in salute to Get Smart, the popular comedy series about spies. Actually it was more like a horrible little closet, with barely space for chairs around the 18 inch-wide conference table. Within the room hung a seemingly permanent cloud of stale smoke. Inman ignored his dingy surroundings and just talked. There was, he admitted, too little coordination between submarine operations and the more statesmanlike mission of detente. By offering all this without doublespeak and without excuses, he separated himself from the larger intelligence community and endeared himself to Pike's staff.

As time went on, Inman had his aides provide Pike with a detailed study of submarine mishaps. It revealed that there had been at least nine collisions with hostile vessels in the previous ten years and more than 110 possible detections of U.S. surveillance subs. Inman admitted that some sub captains were fudging patrol reports to hide the risks they took and the moments when they were detected. He had even assigned Naval Intelligence officials to look into incidents when either reports made by the spooks on board or intercepted Soviet communications contradicted U.S. sub captains' official reports. Inman also briefed Pike personally about the cable-tapping operation.

In the end, this frank, skinny intellectual with the crooked smile ensured that he wasn't nearly as attractive a target as the likes of Colby and Kissinger. Pike's marauders moved on, spending much of their time looking into the imperious ways in which Kissinger had run the 40 Committee and conducted foreign policy. But when Pike's report was finished in early 1976, the intelligence community and the Ford administration convinced Congress to vote to suppress it. A copy was leaked, though, and the Village Voice printed the lengthy report in its entirety. But, as it turned out, only eight paragraphs were devoted to submarine spying, and not a word was said about the cable taps. Instead, general references were made to the basic submarine surveillance programs now deemed valuable by Pike, and the Navy came in for only a gentle scolding: "The Navy's own justification of the program as a `low risk' venture is inaccurate," Pike's crew wrote. They went on to say that the committee was troubled by risk assessments that were "ritualistic and pro forma" and never varied from "low." It also complained that none of the captains of subs involved in collisions had ever been disciplined.

The public had lost its first real opportunity to assess the value of the ongoing undersea grab for intelligence. The Navy's spymasters were rolling right along, just as they always had, and within the submarine ranks it was business, and silence, as usual. All operations would continue. Holystone surveillance operations would now be referred to as "Navy Specials," short for Special Navy Control Program. And Inman and Vice Admiral Robert L. J. Long, the Navy's top submariner, decided to pour even more money into cable-tapping. They decided to get Rickover's okay to finally convert a modern, frontline sub for the work. NURO-the joint CIA/Navy office-had survived the Glomar fiasco, though the CIA would never again have that kind of day-to-day control over any of the Navy spy missions. Instead, NURO had become a funding vehicle for the special projects subs, and Congress quickly approved the money for the latest refit, though it would take a couple of years to ready the new boat.

In the meantime, it was up to the poor and nearly broken Seawolf to carry on with the cable tapping operation. Although a few submariners had risked everything to talk to Pike, little had changed. Nothing was going to stop these missions, even if they were now to be conducted by a sub that was loud and had been ill-fated from the start.[13]

Seawolf had missed her champagne baptism when a congressman's wife missed her aim. This was the same sub that Craven had rejected in the mid-1960s for special projects. She ended up being converted anyway only because Rickover had little use for her, especially after she ran into an undersea mountain in training exercises in 1968. Even after the Navy equipped her with the high-tech deep-sea gear, Seawolf was most notable for her 1950s technology. Her barely-working reactor was so antiquated that her crew joked that if the Soviets ever captured the sub, it would set their nuclear program back 50 years. Just as memorable was the alarm system that the men were calling "the Bitch in the Box," because it rang with a woman's voice-a 1950s telephone operator actually, who was chosen because someone in the Navy decided that she sounded soothing. She announced fires, floods, and other catastrophes, and as far as the Seawolf's crew was concerned, she talked far too much.

Together, Seawolf's mishaps and her missions left her men torn between abject disillusionment and abject pride. One rare diary, kept by a young Seawolf crew member, often reads like a catalogue of complaints. He was well aware that it was patently illegal for anyone in the crew to keep an account about the Navy's most secret missions. But despite everything, Seawolf was making history, the country's history and his, and he was determined to write it.

He describes successful cable-tapping missions in both 1976 and 1977. Indeed, the diary starts off like a techno-thriller: "JUNE 20, 1976-Somewhere off San Francisco, destination: Russia. No doubt about it though we aren't supposed to know-strange things have happened and stranger things I've seen-that book next to the QM stand-Russian sea coast and charting and piloting showing their buoys…"

In some ways Seawolf was just like any other sub. Her crewmen played the same virulent game of "pinging" that existed throughout the fleet, as they took delight in attacking one another with inelegant phrases such as "I wouldn't piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire." And many of the diarist's entries chronicle the boredom and loneliness of life on a sub where the outside world was represented mainly by stockpiles of girlie magazines and "crotch novels" with titles like Cocksure Girls hidden on hoard. On Seawolf, there was a twist: the sub's top-secret camera-toting fish had been dubbed "Happy" and "Linda" after the Happy Hooker and Linda Lovelace, the porn queen.

Monotony was interrupted by mechanical breakdown, which was even more dangerous because many of those breakdowns were taking place in the middle of Soviet waters. There were fires and reactor scrams. Nuclear technicians were so wearied by their faulty reactor that they were popping speed to keep themselves going. Problems with Seawol f's air-conditioning systems got so had that, while she was on the tap site, the crew was forced to relive the days of the Gudgeon-lighting oxygen-generating candles and then snorkeling to ventilate while they were still in the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk.

Soon after that incident the diarist gave up his crotch novels for Alive, a true account of survivors of a plane crash who turned to cannibalism to survive the desperate month when they were lost in the frigid Andes Mountains. He mused about "rum and fresh fruit dreams" as he scribbled, hiding behind the curtain covering his rack, the only place where he had a shadow of privacy. Despite the publicity surrounding the Glomar fiasco, despite the congressional hearings, secrecy reigned within the sub force and especially on hoard Sea wolf.

So he kept his diary hidden, from his commanders, from most of his crewmates. And in the end, he showed that despite the fires and the reactor scrams, he was just as impressed by his sub's exploits as Pike had been: "Found out what we do-the mission of ship-unbelievable-we are ON THE MOOR-finally-really gotta hand it to the USA-not as dumb as let on to be-the country still has balls."