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.