Again they aimed, and again they sent the steel net falling over the conning tower. This time all five claws were in position. It seemed as though Gloinar was going to be able to reel in its catch after all.
Six feet a minute. That was how fast the Golf was pulled toward the surface, 5,000 tons of waterlogged steel. Glomar began to sink deeper into the water against the pull, and then began bucking under the strain. Conversation among the crew shifted from talk of capture to capsizing.
Nine hours passed, and the Golf was 3,000 feet off the seabed. More time, and the submarine was 5,000 feet off the ocean floor, 2 miles away from the surface. Another minute promised to bring another 6 feet of progress. Instead, it brought the wrenching realization that the Golf would never rise any higher.
With one jerk, three of the grasping claws cracked and fell away. They had probably been damaged by the crash into the ocean floor so many hours ago. Now, there were only two claws and the net left holding the forward section of the Golf. The rest of the submarine was dangling mid-ocean, and within moments proved itself just as fragile as Bradley and Craven had predicted six years earlier. The steel of the Golf began to tear at its seams, until the bulk of the sub ripped free from the small section still in Clementine's grasp and fell back into the depths. Back to the ocean floor went the intact nuclear missile, the codebooks, the decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim.
There were no celebrations as the Glomar headed home, no sense of victory that she carried back about 10 percent of a Soviet submarine. Most of this portion was nearly useless from an intelligence standpoint.
Glomar was still out at sea on August 8 when a report came over the radio: Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Air Force One flew Nixon hack to San Clemente, California, for the last time, and much of the crew of this, what was perhaps the last top-secret mission he had sanctioned, blamed his demise on the "damned media."
Back in Washington, the political storm that had so engulfed Hersh abated with Nixon's departure. Hersh had heard nothing of Glomar's attempt, nor of its failure. Nor was he alerted when the CIA's underwater experts began plotting a second try for the sunken Golf. But with Nixon out of the White House, Hersh was back on the intelligence heat. That December, he published a huge expose on the front page of the Times, charging that the CIA had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation," compiling dossiers on ten thousand or more American citizens. CIA operatives, the story said, had been shadowing war protesters and infiltrating antiwar organizations.
The CIA would never fully recover from the charges. Hersh's story set off a wave of public and congressional condemnation and scrutiny. In an effort to keep the inevitable investigations in friendly hands, the new president, Gerald Ford, created a blue ribbon commission to examine Hersh's charges. This time, however, younger members of Congress pushed past the old guard who had always shielded the CIA and insisted that the House and the Senate conduct investigations of their own.
Colby and Hersh were still enmeshed with the fallout from the domestic spying story when Project Jennifer popped back to the surface. It happened on Friday afternoon, February 7, 1975. The early edition of the next day's Los Angeles Times hit the streets screaming news of the recovery attempt in a banner headline splayed across page 1: "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA, Hughes Told."
After holding on to the story for nearly a year, Hersh had been scooped. The Los Angeles Times story had mistakes-it said the sunken sub was in the Atlantic-and gave only limited details. Still, as far as Hersh was concerned, the story was out, and he saw no reason not to step in and finally publish a full account. Colby was just as determined to stop him.
For Colby, the stakes were still huge. Unknown to Hersh, Project.Jennifer was far from over. The CIA was moving ahead with plans for a second recovery attempt. After the first awful failure, CIA technical experts had convinced Colby that the Glomar Explorer could still reach down and steal crucial pieces of the Golf. The Hughes ship was already being refitted and repaired, and the second try was scheduled for that summer. To Colby, it seemed as if he were right back where he had started with Hersh a year earlier.
Colby believed that if the matter died quickly, the Soviets might miss the Los Angeles Times story altogether. But if the article began to get attention, or if Hersh stepped in now with a better rendition of the facts, perhaps with the actual location of the Golf, Colby would have to halt the operation and the agency would have to shoulder another fiasco, one with a huge price tag.
The CIA immediately sent two agents to see the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Their message was simple: Jennifer was not over and publicity could make it impossible for the CIA to bring home the big catch. Neither agent said that there had already been one dismal failure. Nor did they specifically say that plans were afoot for a second attempt. But the editor wasn't asking too many questions-he just agreed to bury the Glomar story on page 18 in the paper's final editions and promised not to run any follow-ups, at least not for the time being.
Colby then called the New York Times publisher and asked him to have Hersh "cool it down a little" on Jennifer. He also returned another call from Hersh, telling him, "You've been first-class about this for a long time."
But the flattery wasn't going to stop Hersh from digging into the story now, and other reporters were jumping on it as well. So Colby crafted a desperate plan, one that was unprecedented in the annals of agency history. He decided to tell dozens of editors and publishers, broadcasters and producers, about Project Jennifer, to give them some details. But his offering carried a price. The editors in turn were being asked to hold the story back. Colby made one last concession: if it looked as though anyone was going to break the embargo, he would call all the others and give them the go-ahead to publish.
He knew full well that keeping Jennifer out of the papers would be about as easy as forcing a lid on a boiling pot. He began describing himself as the center of "the weirdest conspiracy in town."
That's not to say Colby trusted his co-conspirators. The CIA began to monitor some of the reporters who were working on the story. Agents secretly recorded their conversations with journalists, investigated their backgrounds, and rated their performances. There were dozens of secret files. One unidentified West Coast reporter-code-named E-14-was deemed a "journalistic prostitute" and "a heavy drinker."
But above all others, Colby and crew were watching Hersh. They tracked who he talked to on a trip to the West Coast, helped by the fact that many of the people he tried to interview reported straight back to Colby. Among the people Hersh contacted was John Craven, who was now teaching at the University of Hawaii. Although Craven's dreams of building a fleet of small deep-submergence search vehicles had been swamped by the enormous cost of the Glomar Explorer, he wasn't about to cough up the secret. "Project what?" Craven answered when Hersh told him what he was chasing.
Still, Craven agreed to meet Hersh a week later at the ornate Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. The undersecretary of the Navy urged Craven to try to find out who Hersh's sources were, but by the time they got together, fencing and blustering over cocktails, neither man gave up much. It was clear that Hersh had the story in hand whether Craven gave him any help or not.
Finally, on March 18, syndicated investigative columnist Jack Anderson declared an end to the intrigue and prepared to air the story during his show on the Mutual Radio Network. Colby rushed in, but Anderson refused to reconsider.