Shadow Warrior (67 page)

On November 4, 1972, the
Hughes Glomar Explorer
, a specially modified version of the
Challenger
, was launched with the usual fanfare, including speeches by officials of the Ocean Mining Division of the Hughes Tool Corporation. (Hughes himself, in the last stages of decline, was holed up in his Las Vegas penthouse dosing himself with narcotics and laxatives and watching movies sixteen hours a day.) On August 11, the vessel departed for the 12,700-mile voyage around the southern tip of South America, destined for its next station at Long Beach, California.
⁴⁸

Once ensconced on the West Coast, however, the
Glomar
commenced its transformation from a purely “white” status, that is, commercial, to “black,” a top-secret intelligence ship. The huge vessel measured 618 feet in length (almost twice the size of the sunken sub) and was equipped with a giant “moon pool” in the ship's hold, with doors that could open downward to accept bulky cargo from the ocean floor. Suspended beneath the ship was a clawlike apparatus that would be used to grapple the sub's hull, and beneath that a submersible barge where the wreckage could be stored. One shipyard worker later described the
Glomar
's control room as “something out of James Bond, Jules Verne, ‘1984', and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.'”
⁴⁹

As the vessel's crew tested the specialized equipment and readied everything for departure, pressure mounted. The ship would have to cast off by the second week in June to accommodate the only “good-weather window” available to salvagers working the North Pacific, a time frame that stretched from July through early September. Technicians estimated that raising the sub would require fourteen to twenty-one days. On June 7, 1974, Nixon gave final approval for Azorian, and the ship arrived at the recovery site 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii on July 4.
⁵⁰

By this point, Project Azorian was Bill Colby's. His enthusiasm for the salvage operation knew no bounds. The top-secret attempt to raise the K-129, the largest salvage operation in history, had it all—danger, suspense, cutting-edge technology, high risk, and the promise of a huge payoff. Indeed, Azorian was potentially comparable to Ultra and Magic, the famous
World War II decoding operations that had allowed the Allies to intercept and read Axis communications. The salvage operation just might be the intelligence coup he and the Agency needed to recover from the Yom Kippur fiasco. Colby had huddled with the mission director and ship's captain just prior to the
Glomar
's departure in June. Both men reported that morale among the crew was sky-high. Colby observed that he knew what it was like to conduct operations in the field with the enemy at hand and no help in sight. He would trust the men onsite to make whatever decisions needed to be made and take any action necessary. Whatever the outcome, he would back them up.
⁵¹

When the
Glomar
arrived onsite, seas were running 7 to 8 feet high, and the captain postponed operations until the 14th, when the weather subsided. On the 17th, the
Glomar
learned that a Soviet naval vessel, the
Chazhma
, was approaching the recovery site. Throughout the next ten days, the
Chazhma
and another Soviet vessel hovered, but they failed to detect the real purpose of the
Glomar
's mission.
⁵²

On July 26, the operation command center reported contact with the ocean floor. Several hours later, television cameras mounted on the recovery apparatus captured the image of a silt-covered hull and conning tower; the K-129 had been found. By August 1, the pipe-string cradle had been fitted underneath the submarine and the
Glomar
's winches began hauling the huge payload to the surface. Then, when the sub was about two-thirds of the way up, it broke apart; the rear two-thirds of the ship, including the conning tower and the missiles, dropped back to the seafloor. The crew of the
Glomar
braced for a possible nuclear explosion, but there was none.
⁵³

Colby and his lieutenants followed every development with anxious interest. “Carl Duckett, who was the deputy director for science and technology,” Jenonne Walker recalled, “would brief the group on how many inches or centimeters it had come up since the last meeting. There was enormous excitement about the possibility of capturing the gadgets that were on that sub. I remember the disappointment and desolation when it broke in two.” The remaining one-third, which included the K-129's nuclear-tipped torpedoes and a cache of documents, was pulled up into the well of the
Glomar
. Back in Washington, the 40 Committee directed Colby to make a try at recovering the remains of the Soviet sub during the window of opportunity that would come in 1975. Unfortunately for US intelligence, there would be no second chance.
⁵⁴

In the fall of 1973, Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the
New York Times
who had won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre, pried the outlines of the secret effort to salvage the Soviet sub out of a high administration official. In search of additional information, the journalist called Assistant Attorney General Laurence Silberman. “He asked me about the
Glomar Explorer
,” Silberman later recalled. “I knew nothing about it and called Colby. His response was, ‘Oh shit!'” Colby told Silberman that any publicity about the Soviet submarine salvage operation would endanger one of the greatest intelligence coups in American history. Silberman got back to Hersh, who agreed to hold publication on condition that Colby meet and give him the full picture. At a White House meeting, the DCI asked permission to cooperate with the journalist. “Hersh has a story about the Soviet submarine,” he told Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, and Admiral Thomas Moorer. “I would like to level with him and appeal to his patriotism.” Kissinger's response was a terse no.
⁵⁵

Colby then met with Agency lawyers and his science advisers to plan a course of action. To hell with Henry, they decided; the DCI should take Hersh's deal. On February 1, 1974, Colby met with the journalist at the offices of the
New York Times
and briefed him on Azorian. “I went to see Seymour Hersh,” Colby subsequently told White House aide Fred Buzhardt. “Henry thought I was crazy, but I had to.” Hersh, who originally viewed the story as a study in CIA and Pentagon waste, was skeptical at first. He thought all the cloak-and-dagger stuff was just a cover. In the days that followed, Hersh and his superiors at the
Times
came around. But the journalist warned Colby that if he had gotten wind of Azorian, it would not be long before other enterprising reporters did, too.
⁵⁶

It then came to light that early on the morning of June 5, while the
Glomar Explorer
was making final preparations to depart Long Beach for a second try at salvaging the Soviet sub, a team of burglars had broken into the Los Angeles offices of Summa Corporation. According to the night watchman, who was bound and gagged, the intruders seemed to know what they were looking for. In the end, they departed carrying four footlockers of documents and an estimated $68,000 in cash. Summa executives subsequently informed Colby that among the things taken was a memo outlining negotiations between the Agency and the Hughes Corporation over construction of the
Glomar Explorer
and describing the scheme to raise the K-129.
⁵⁷

The Summa Corporation burglars might try to market the
Glomar Explorer
documents to one or more media outlets, but Colby comforted himself with the thought that it was going to be difficult to convince a reputable newspaper or magazine to publish a story based on them. But on Friday afternoon, February 7, 1975, the late edition of the
Los Angeles Times
carried banner headlines: “US Reported After Russian Submarine? Sunken Ship Deal by CIA, Hughes Told.” The story reported that Hughes had contracted with the CIA to raise a sunken Soviet submarine “from the North Atlantic.” It described the
Glomar Explorer
in a few sentences and then revealed that proof of the existence of “Project Jennifer” was included in the material stolen from Hughes's Romaine Street offices. With this, Colby leaped into action. The DCI had one of his West Coast operatives contact the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
, who immediately expressed regret, had the story relegated to page eighteen in the second edition, and ordered his reporters not to write anything further. Colby managed to have a follow-up story published in the
New York Times
on the 8th buried on page thirty.
⁵⁸

But hadn't the damage already been done, hadn't the Kremlin been tipped off, and therefore hadn't plans to raise the remainder of the Soviet vessel, scheduled for the summer of 1975, been rendered moot? Perhaps not. Colby recalled that during World War II, the
Chicago Tribune
had reported in banner headlines that US Naval Intelligence had broken the Japanese diplomatic and military code. President Roosevelt had been beside himself with anger and anxiety, but the Japanese kept using the same code, and the Americans kept intercepting and deciphering their top-secret messages. It could have been that Tokyo simply did not get wind of the story; more probably, the Japanese High Command believed the article a ruse, assuming that no country would ever permit a secret of such magnitude to be published by a member of its national media.
⁵⁹

With the
Glomar Explorer
's follow-up voyage just five months away, the director of the CIA waged an increasingly frantic war to keep the Soviet sub story out of print and off the airwaves. Finally, however, the dam broke. On the morning of March 18, 1975, Colby succeeded in persuading National Public Radio to hold its water. But that afternoon, he learned that syndicated columnist Jack Anderson was about to go public with news of Azorian. Colby called Anderson and, par for the course, appealed to his patriotism. Anderson was unmoved and proceeded to discuss the
Glomar
Explorer
on his radio program that evening, focusing on the Hughes connection. The next day the
New York Times
went with Hersh's full story. “C.I.A Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles,” the headline read.
⁶⁰

A flotilla of Soviet vessels rushed to the salvage site and parked itself there more or less permanently. Phase II of Project Azorian was canceled. The Ford administration debated how to react. Somewhat surprisingly, Colby argued for an absolute “no comment.” He reminded Ford and Kissinger that during the U-2 crisis in 1960, it was Eisenhower's public admission that Gary Powers had been on a spy mission over the Soviet Union that had so angered Khrushchev and caused him to call off the Paris summit. “I think we should not put the Soviet Union under such pressure to respond,” the DCI advised. And so, silence it was. Colby proved correct. Moscow was not forced to express outrage and wave the flag; détente continued uninterrupted.
⁶¹

It was indicative of the widespread mistrust of the CIA that many journalists and public intellectuals were convinced that ulterior motives lay behind Colby's attempted cover-up. Hersh and Anderson continued to think that Jennifer/Azorian was not so much a case of espionage but a matter of government pork. Victor Marchetti told the
Village Voice
that the DCI had deliberately leaked the
Glomar
story in an effort to take some of the tarnish off of the Agency's image. “Project Jennifer was a put up job,” he said. “I think the CIA leaked that story. They've been getting so much bad publicity. . . . Colby's a very clever man.”
⁶²

A footnote to Project Azorian: The next year, Howard Hughes died. One of his chief mourners was Jim Angleton. “Howard Hughes!” he exclaimed to
Time
magazine. “Where his country's interests were concerned, no man knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him.”
⁶³

B
eing DCI changed Bill Colby; he had run large, complex operations before—the Saigon station, the Far East Division, CORDS, and Plans/Operations—but now he was a public figure who was expected to be on top of world events and a person of gravitas within and without the administration. He was a player on the Washington stage whether he liked it or not. Increasingly he did.

When Colby was not out of the country on an inspection tour or meeting with the head of a friendly foreign intelligence service, his day resembled that of a major cabinet officer. At 6:30
A.M
. the alarm went off and he climbed out of bed. After retrieving and reading the
Washington Post
, it was calisthenics and a light breakfast. At 8:00 his driver and security officer picked him up in a dark blue, armor-plated Chevrolet. On the drive to the office he read the
New York Times
and the
Daily Intelligencer
. Colby wanted to know by the time he got to Langley what was going on in the world that would be of particular interest to the Agency and how American intelligence was being treated in that day's columns. At 8:25
A.M
., his auto dropped him off; the director walked through the marble entrance hall and took his private elevator to the seventh floor. Huddling briefly with his secretary, Barbara Pindar, and his assistant, Jenonne Walker, he then walked into the conference room at 9:00 sharp to meet with his principal deputies. At 10:00, it was the turn of the US Intelligence Board, which he chaired. Frequently, before going to lunch in the general dining room, he would award a medal to some deserving operator just out of the bush in Southeast Asia or Africa. From 1:30 to 3:00, Colby might prepare for a National Security Council meeting in the White House basement; there, he would
brief Kissinger and the other members of the national security team on the ongoing North Vietnamese buildup in South Vietnam or some other topic. Then it was back through rush-hour traffic to Langley, where he spent a couple of hours on crisis management. At 7:00 it was home to a quiet dinner and more document perusal, or to get dressed for one of Washington's ubiquitous dinners or receptions.
¹