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.