The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

by Josh Dean

The money trail called for creative accounting; to allow Kelly Johnson to begin work before the official financial arrangements were in place, the Agency used a portion of its black funds, funneled through subsidiary accounts attached to front companies, to pay Lockheed using personal checks. More than a million dollars arrived that way, by regular mail at Johnson’s Encino home, and he deposited the checks into a phony corporation he called C&J Engineering. This process, Johnson’s deputy, Ben Rich, remarked, “has to be the wildest government payout in history.”

One of the big ones: The US military was using bad maps. Photo interpreters noticed that the geodetic data used to make the Air Force’s nuclear target maps were wrong. The U-2 showed the earth to be slightly oblong and not a perfect sphere, meaning that the targets assigned to all of the US ICBMs were each about twenty miles off. Had war broken out, every missile would have missed.

Yes, there are manganese nodules there, Pasho would tell him, but they were particularly deep, much more so than in other locations he’d been studying, and of a lower quality than deposits in other areas. What’s more, that area of the Pacific Ocean was notoriously difficult to operate in, known for bad weather and violent seas. But it was the sampling device designed for a ship the engineers were working on that really didn’t make sense to Pasho. The ship was the Glomar II and it was supposedly being prepared for a prototype mining trip out in the Pacific. Pasho had seen the sketches and models of the so-called sampling device, and he knew that no sane engineer would sign off on a design like that if the real purpose of the mission was to reap sample nodules from the floor. He grew more and more suspicious. The concept—essentially a big clamshell to grab things off the seabed—just didn’t seem right. Pasho wanted to know and have a better understanding of what he was doing, so he typed out a memo explaining his confusion about the project and delivered it to Krutein’s desk.

A day later, Pasho was summoned to the office of Global’s VP, John Evans. The moment he walked through the door, he knew he’d stumbled into something. Three men in suits, one wearing sunglasses, stood around the office, looking almost stuffed. Evans handed Pasho a piece of paper. “Maybe you want to take a look at this and sign it,” he said. Pasho signed Walt Lloyd’s secrecy form, embossed with a bald eagle, and got the story. The next day, fully cleared, he moved out of Global Marine’s downtown headquarters and into a new location known as “the program office.”

Bringloe got his first hint that the barge wasn’t really going to be used for mining when a neighbor stopped him to say that a private investigator had come by asking questions about his background and character, ostensibly as part of the evaluation process for a large insurance policy. He hadn’t applied for any insurance policy, but he suspected that wasn’t the true story, anyway—a hunch confirmed when Glosten summoned him to a meeting where two men in suits explained that his services were required for the national security of the United States and that he should never speak about the work he was about to do, even to family.

What Clementine had to do required technical precision of a kind that would be difficult to accomplish on the surface, considering the size of the machines in question, but to do it under the ocean—three miles away from the men who’d be operating the device—would require the most advanced technologies on the planet, including some that would have to be invented for the operation. The capture vehicle was outfitted with a suite of sensors, including long-range sonar, high-resolution sonar, and altitude/attitude sonar, plus twelve television cameras lit with twenty-six lights to provide the eyes for the men on the controls up on the surface. Really, Clementine needed only the acoustic or the optical system, but because the Azorian team would get only one shot at this mission, every facet of the vehicle’s operation had a redundant system to provide a backup if the primary system failed. To locate and place itself over the wreck, Clementine carried an array of beacon transponders that were to be dropped around the target. Hydrophones on the CV would listen to these beacons, and onboard software used that data to position the CV over the target with an accuracy of one foot.

The enormous steel fingers were too big to hide inside truck trailers and had to be strapped onto flatbeds that exceeded the typical size allowed on American interstates. The rigs would be officially oversize, requiring special clearance to pass through certain more persnickety states. The Agency hired one of its more clever trucking contractors, Leonard Brothers, from Miami. Leonard did various special transport jobs for the government and was known for having excellent relationships with the highway inspectors of most US states. Leonard Brothers agents kept detailed records of which inspectors were most difficult, and which were more lenient, and what shifts everyone worked. Schedules were then optimized to run the loads across problematic states when the friendliest inspectors were on duty. If necessary, they’d slip a case of Jack Daniel’s off the truck when passing through as a thank-you.

“We need you to trust us that this is not Howard Hughes’s ship. It belongs to the United States government. Summa Corp does and should not owe any taxes to Los Angeles County.” As a result, no one was going to pay the 25 percent tax that a typical commercial ship owner would owe. If necessary, the government would pay the same 1 percent rate paid to San Mateo County, based on a rate granted to privately owned oceanographic vessels conducting scientific research. “But if it’s a government-owned ship, you don’t need to pay any taxes,” Watson replied. Kucera smiled. “I know. But it’s not a government-owned ship.” He held the silence after that statement a few seconds to let Watson absorb the subtext. “It’s a mining research vessel and its owners should pay their fair tax.”

Shtyrov, however, was prepared. He told his boss that Soviet naval intelligence had done everything it could do to stop the Americans from meddling with the wreck, but his warnings were repeatedly ignored by the high command. The leadership refused to help him, he said, and he had an entire file to back up what he was saying. The commander subsequently lashed out at Naval Command in Moscow, and both sides pointed fingers while doing almost nothing of consequence except firing Shtyrov, the one man who actually tried to do something.

Crooke had arranged for Global Marine to have right of first refusal on the Explorer for ten years after the mission, and he was actually willing to buy the ship outright, only to be told that the US government couldn’t sell it because an environmental inspection showed that it was highly polluted with PCBs from the hydraulic systems.