ALSO BY JOSH DEAN
Show Dog
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Copyright © 2017 byf Josh Dean
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The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.
—John Foster Dulles
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
—Arthur C. Clarke
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
—Winston Churchill
If ever legends and stories of American technological genius were deserved and not yet realized, they would be about the scientists and engineers—the wizards—of [the] CIA.
—Robert M. Gates
For my dad,
who needs to stick around
for a few more books
CONTENTS
Also by Josh Dean
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Hughes Glomar Explorer Schematic
PROLOGUE | Unexpected Visitors
1 | K‐129 Down
2 | Is This What You Were Looking For?
3 | Finders Keepers
4 | Enter the Halibut
5 | Okay, Now What?
6 | America’s Top Secret Hub of Innovation
7 | Faster and More Furious
8 | Same Man, Different Mission
9 | Need to Know
10 | So, How Do We Steal a Submarine, Anyway?
11 | Epiphany
12 | The Secret Office of Underwater Spies
13 | Global Marine to the Rescue
14 | Ocean Mining 101
15 | Every Great Ship Has a Great Naval Architect
16 | Big Bertha
17 | Paging Howard Hughes
18 | Building a Bulletproof Lie
19 | The Big Con
20 | The Program Office
21 | Back to the Wreck Site
22 | A Minor Complication
23 | We Need a Bigger Boat
24 | The Mother of All Barges
25 | Oh My Darling, Clementine
26 | Across the Airport
27 | Accountability Matters
28 | We Need More Proof
29 | A Ship Rises in Philadelphia
30 | Come One, Come All!
31 | Surprise, Surprise
32 | Ongoing Resistance
33 | Graham’s Masterpiece
34 | Bon Voyage
35 | On to Long Beach
36 | Paint It Black
37 | Strike!
38 | Graham Gets Sick
39 | We Need a Crew
40 | So, Who’s Going?
41 | West Coast Sea Trials
42 | A Crack in the Facade
43 | Sub School
44 | Standing by for Green Light
45 | Twiddling Thumbs
46 | Waiting, More Waiting
47 | Trouble on Romaine Street
48 | Let’s Go Fishing!
49 | Hurry up and Wait
50 | Trouble on the Horizon
51 | Here Comes Trouble
52 | Action All Over
53 | Meanwhile, Back at LAX
54 | The Breaking Point
55 | Touchdown!
56 | Tysons, We Have a Problem
57 | Assessing the Catch
58 | Down Goes Nixon
59 | Crew Change
60 | Burial at Sea
61 | Good-bye, Azorian; Hello, Matador
62 | The Beginning of the End
63 | More Legal Troubles
64 | What Are We Doing Again?
65 | Stranger Than Fiction
66 | The SEC Butts In
67 | Damn You, Jack Anderson
68 | Tumbling Down
69 | The End Is the End, Isn’t It?
70 | That’s All She Wrote
71 | All Good Things Come to an End
AFTERWORD | The Glomar Response
EPILOGUE | The Last Days of Mr. P
The Long View
Photographs
Acknowledgments
A Note About Sources
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Unexpected Visitors
NOVEMBER 1969
As he often did in the morning, Curtis Crooke was reviewing projects with members of his engineering staff when his intercom chimed. A resolute rail of a man with buzzed hair and metal-rimmed Wayfarer-style glasses, Crooke, then just forty-one, was one of the most influential minds in the emerging field of deep-ocean drilling, directing all engineering for his employer, Global Marine, from a large office on the second floor of its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. The building was an area landmark, an ornate art deco tower with a soaring three-story lobby, known as the Fine Arts Building, and informally as the Havenstrite Building, for the eccentric oil wildcatter Russell E. Havenstrite, who once occupied its posh full-floor penthouse.
Global Marine was only nineteen years old but already an industry leader, with “the most versatile offshore drilling fleet in the world,” according to its 1968 sales brochure. In just two and a half years, from 1965 to the middle of 1967, Global Marine had designed and built five “heavy, ocean-going, self-propelled drilling ships”—including two four-hundred-foot, eleven-thousand-ton vessels that were the largest of their kind ever built—and every one of them came to be under the direction of Curtis Crooke, who had been with Global Marine since its founding.
Crooke grew up in New York City as the youngest of four kids. His father, a GMAC executive, was wounded in World War I and eventually died of complications from those injuries when Curtis was only seven, but he left the family well-off, and Curtis had a happy, uneventful childhood and adolescence in Forest Hills, Queens, home of the US Open at the West Side Tennis Club, until going west for college, to learn everything he could about boats and the ocean at UCLA and then UC Berkeley.
Dozens of talented men worked under the handsome, charming, disarmingl
y easygoing Crooke, who favored loosely knotted ties and off-the-rack button-downs at a time when executives wore suits. He drove a red Ferrari 250 California, typically very fast, and was known for being the calm, reasonable person in any room. Crooke was the only man on the executive floor who never closed his office door, which endeared him to his engineers, who loved him and the work. They came to Global Maine for the opportunity to build ships and plunder the deep ocean, a realm that, in 1969, was as much of a mystery to humankind as outer space. Crooke was a development engineer himself, with experience in fluid mechanics, hydrodynamics, and oceanography, but his real talent was in management and business development. He was a born leader so comfortable in his position and skin that he often took afternoon naps upright in his chair with his feet on the desk and the door wide open.
“I’ve got a man on the phone who says he needs to see you,” Crooke’s secretary said, interrupting the meeting.
“Who is he?” Crooke replied.
“Tell him I’m in the middle of something and please take a message.”
Crooke resumed the conversation with his engineers, but moments later, the intercom sounded again. This time, his secretary reported that the man was very persistent and wasn’t taking the hint. He wanted Crooke to know that he was a potential customer with a large piece of business requiring immediate attention. He absolutely could not wait.
This was certainly unusual. Crooke was annoyed but also curious about the man and the message he so desperately wanted to share. Still, he was in a meeting. Crooke asked his secretary to tell the man that, as he’d already stated, he was busy, but he’d be willing to see him later that morning, when the schedule cleared, if she could set something up.
Five minutes later, the intercom buzzed again.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crooke, but now the man is here, with two other men, and he says he needs to see you immediately.”
The engineers sitting around Crooke looked at their boss, wondering how he might react. And he was chewing on that notion himself when his door opened and three men, all in suits, strutted through. The one who appeared to be in charge was about forty and of average height but thick in the shoulders and middle. He had black hair, parted on the left and slicked back, and as soon as he and his colleagues were through the office door, he closed it behind them—a brash display even more jarring to Crooke because he rarely ever shut that door himself.
The entry was so sudden, so surprising, so brazen, that Crooke just stared up at the intruders through the tinted lenses of his glasses. He apologized to his engineers and asked if they could resume the meeting later.
As soon as they left, the man with the slicked hair spoke.
“Mr. Crooke, I’m John Parangosky,” he said. “This is Alex Holzer and Paul Evans, and we all work for the Central Intelligence Agency. I assume you know what that is. Now,” he said, approaching the round table where Crooke had been sitting, “do you mind if we sit down?”
Parangosky took the chair across from Crooke, while the two other men both pulled up chairs on the same side, to his left.
“Am I supposed to just accept that this is true?” Crooke said. He wasn’t sure what to think. Global Marine was not a government contractor and he’d never met an officer from the CIA, let alone done business with one. It felt like a prank. “Do you have an ID?”
“We don’t carry those,” Parangosky replied, explaining that in his field it wasn’t good for a man to ever really be himself in public. He had plenty of business cards in various cases and desk drawers, but none of them identified his actual job. Or his real name.
“So you’re saying you rarely tell the truth about who you are?” Crooke said and cracked a smile. “With that name you gave me you could be Russian.” By this point, he was more intrigued than annoyed. The whole episode was so bizarre and unlike anything he’d experienced before that he was curious to see what happened next. “Anyway, you’ve ruined my meeting and got my attention. What can I do for you?”
Parangosky explained that he had been reading up on ocean drilling and was convinced that Global Marine was the only company in the country—really, on the planet—that could complete a job that interested the Agency; a job important enough that he, his chief scientist (Holzer), and his chief of security (Evans) had flown from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles with no advance warning to ask a single question in person. The larger context was classified, Parangosky said, so he wasn’t going to be able to go into detail or answer any questions—at least not at this point. Those things would come later, if they decided to work together.
Crooke nodded and told the man to continue.
“Is it feasible, using your current technology, or technology that’s within the realm of possibility, to lift something weighing several thousand tons from the bottom of the ocean, at a depth of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand feet?”
The question surprised Crooke, but he wasn’t shocked by it. Global Marine was in the business of extraordinary engineering—innovation, especially in the deep ocean, was the company hallmark. But it also wasn’t something he could answer offhand.
“Honestly,” Crooke replied, “I don’t know. I’m going to have to think about it.”
“That’s fine,” Parangosky said. “Please do that. We’ll be in touch.”
And that was it. He shook Crooke’s hand, and all three men rose and left, closing the door behind them—Holzer and Evans without having uttered a single word.
Crooke was young by any measure. He studied at UC Berkeley’s acclaimed marine program under some of the giants of ocean science, and he was in charge of Global Marine’s engineering for the same reason twenty-five-year-olds run technology companies today—because this was a new industry. Established oil companies had no experience working offshore and didn’t have research arms set up to explore it. This left a market hole for innovative start-ups, and Global Marine was basically that, an ambitious engineering shop spun out of a collaboration between the Continental, Union, Shell, and Superior Oil companies that had, very quickly, become a global leader in developing technology to access natural resources under the ocean.
For a few minutes after his visitors left, Crooke sat and thought about what this strange man with the slicked hair had just asked him. What weighs several thousand tons and would be important enough that the CIA would want to pull it off the bottom of the ocean? His first thought was a submarine.
This wasn’t a total guess. Global Marine had recently consulted with the Navy following the loss of the nuclear sub the USS Scorpion, which had sunk in the Atlantic on May 22 of the previous year, resulting in the loss of ninety-nine American lives. The Navy had come in search of ideas for recovering or even scuttling the wreck so that its reactor could be neutralized, and Crooke had given them several proposals based on a concept Global Marine favored and had become very proficient with—using a long strand of interconnected steel pipe known as a drill string to deploy equipment such as drill bits to the seafloor. The simplest idea, he thought, was to pump the hull full of concrete, eliminating the risk of a reactor leak. He didn’t get the job.
Crooke walked over to a large bookcase on his office wall and scanned the titles until he saw the spine of Jane’s Fighting Ships, a tall, thin volume wrapped in a laminated blue cover. He flipped through until he found Soviet submarines, and the numbers matched up, more or less.
Later, he scratched some calculations with a pencil on graph paper and consulted a copy of the Spang Tubular Products catalog in search of industrial pipe cased in HY-100 high-strength military-spec steel—the highest-grade steel possible, and the primary type used in submarine and ship construction. What Crooke wanted to figure out was whether it was technically possible to deploy and control a tapered string of HY-100–cased pipe three to four miles long in the open ocean—and not just that, but also whether or
not some kind of device on the end of the string could grab and lift a massive object back to the surface.
The answer was inconclusive. This wasn’t the kind of problem even a brilliant marine engineer could solve quickly on a scratch pad, but Crooke decided that it was compelling enough to investigate further. The job might not be possible, ultimately, but according to some very rough math—and the knowledge accumulated over a decade of drillship work—it didn’t seem to be impossible, either.
A day later, Parangosky returned, again without warning. This time, Crooke told his secretary to send the men right in.
“Did you think about it?” Parangosky asked.
“I did,” Crooke replied. “I think it’s possible.”
“Good,” Parangosky said. “I’ll get the papers drawn up and have a work order sent over.”
Once those were signed, he said, he’d be at liberty to tell the entire story.
1
K-129 Down
FEBRUARY 1968
The Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarine K-129 left Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s remote, frigid Kamchatka peninsula, with a crew of ninety-eight after dark on February 24, 1968, for a routine but unexpected patrol. No external markings signified the sub’s name, and even its hull number was painted over so that the vessel would be unrecognizable to any ship that happened to notice it when it surfaced to gulp air and run the diesel motors that recharged its onboard batteries.
The Golf-class sub, which the Soviets called by its side number, PL-574, was under the command of an ascendant thirty-eight-year-old Ukrainian captain first rank named Vladimir Kobzar, who was leading his final mission aboard the boat he’d commanded for four years. When the submarine returned to its home base, Kobzar would move to Soviet fleet headquarters to assume a more senior position commanding multiple subs from a desk.
Kobzar was one of the most experienced captains in the fleet, a rigorous, demanding man so highly regarded that many in the submarine service thought he might one day command the entire fleet. He had been given the Order of the Red Star for service and was being rewarded for his four years at sea with a promotion that was certain not to be his last. Kobzar was loved by his crew and respected by his superiors, who noted how he personally helped train watch officers, oversaw survival training, and could capably handle any job on the sub. He had a question he liked to repeat to men under his command: “Who is the most dangerous man on a submarine? The one who doesn’t know what he’s doing!”