"I don't think the government has a right to cover up a boondoggle," he said later. "I have withheld other stories at the behest of the CIA, but this was simply a cover-up of a $350 million failure-$350 million literally went down into the ocean." (Government officials later put the cost at more than $500 million.)
The story was out, and Hersh finally got to publish his much-fuller account of Project Jennifer in the next day's New York Times. It ran with a five-column, three-line headline: "CIA Salvage Ship Brought up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles." The banner treatment of the word Failed was enough to make Colby cringe, and the story's lead probably didn't make him feel any better: "The Central Intelligence Agency financed the construction of a multimillion-dollar deep-sea salvage vessel and used it in an unsuccessful effort last summer to recover hydrogen-warhead missiles and codes from a sunken Soviet submarine in the Pacific Ocean, according to high Government officials." Hersh went on to note that the CIA recovered only an insignificant forward chunk of the Golf, and he summed up the assessment of unnamed critics, saying that the possibility of retrieving "outmoded code books and outmoded missiles did not justify either the high cost of the operation or its potential for jeopardizing the United States-Soviet detente."
Overall, the story was a picture of waste, not heroics, and one that some naval officers quietly applauded. The CIA had, after all, been trying to swim in their waters, had stolen their prized find, and had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Project Jennifer was a bust, and in the Navy's eyes, it was also a downright foolish mission to begin with.
Hersh mistakenly wrote that as many as seventy bodies had been recovered in the wreckage, when only six were recovered. But he did also echo one of the points that Colby had been most intent on making, that the CIA had held a burial service for the Soviet dead and videotaped it in case the Soviet Union ever found out about the recovery attempt and demanded information.
Colby himself had stopped talking altogether, rationalizing his belated silence as the only way to prevent the Soviets from being forced into a public reaction. He made that point at a visit to the White House. Toting a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's Memoirs, he showed President Ford where Khrushchev wrote that he had been forced to feign public outrage and cancel a summit meeting in 1960 when Eisenhower openly admitted that the U-2s flying over the Soviet Union were spy planes and not simply weather planes blown off course.
Not wanting to repeat Eisenhower's "error," the Ford administration met all further queries about Glomar with a strict "no comment." That was exactly what the Soviets wanted. They began sending frantic backchannel messages through any contacts they had, begging for U.S. silence-anything to keep the story from Soviet citizens who were still in the dark.[12]
One Soviet naval attache approached a U.S. Navy captain at a party and offered a deaclass="underline" if the U.S. didn't raise the issue again publicly, the Soviets wouldn't either. Kissinger was having similar conversations as he quietly arranged damage control, among other things promising Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the CIA would drop its plans for a second recovery attempt. Kissinger also gave Dobrynin the names of three young submariners whose metal dog tags had been recovered amid parts of the six bodies in the salvage attempt.
With that, the Soviets seemed to let the matter drop, and in the end Colby's silence left so much mystery surrounding Project Jennifer that myth and reality blurred. The U.S. government had given the Soviets more detailed information than it gave the American public, leaving the press to fill the gap with wildly inaccurate accounts of Glomar's expedition.
Nearly every newspaper and magazine reported that the United States had recovered the forward third of the 300-foot-long sub. But former Navy officials say that only a 38-foot piece was brought to the surface. Among the initial newspaper accounts, there was also confusion about what type of submarine had been lost. The CIA and other government sources had been unwilling to admit that the target of the whole venture was an antiquated diesel boat. The CIA also clearly leaked misinformation about the Golf's location, telling reporters that the operation had taken place 750 miles northwest of Hawaii when it was really about 1,700 miles away. This probably was done in an effort to throw the Soviets off track.
Ultimately, it seems the agency even convinced some reporters that Project Jennifer had been at least moderately successful, at least judging from some later articles.
Still, the episode created a huge debate among journalists over whether Colby's efforts to quash the story marked one of those moments when the phrase "national security" was used not to save national secrets, but national embarrassment. If anything, Colby's gambit left most journalists increasingly skeptical about acquiescing to requests by intelligence officials to hold back on such stories. Indeed, most reporters wrote that Project Jennifer was a huge failure and that the CIA had gone to great lengths to hide that.
Had the press known the full truth, it would have lambasted the CIA even more. In recent interviews with former top Navy officials, it has become clear that the CIA got away with its most glaring omission of alclass="underline" the fact that Colby's much-touted plan for a second recovery attempt had been ludicrous from its inception.
In late 1974, several months before Colby's scramble to save the Glomar secret for a second try, the Navy had sent the USS Seawolf hack to the Golf's grave site. Seawolf had just been converted to join Halibut as a second "special projects" submarine. Using electronic "fish" to carry cameras down to the lost sub, Seawolf had collected photographs that showed the Golf had shattered after Glomar dropped it and lay in tiny unidentifiable pieces, a vast mosaic decorating the sand.
"It dissolved just like that, like an Alka-Seltzer in water," one former high-ranking naval officer says. "It spread all over acres on the ocean floor." Said another former Navy officiaclass="underline" "It shattered. The judgment was made that there was no possibility to recover anything more."
These men say that there was almost no chance of finding relatively small items like warheads, code machines, and antennas. And the officers were amazed that the CIA didn't seem to recognize that. Among the Navy men who stood out as critics of the second recovery effort were Captain Bradley, who, though retired, was a consultant to NURO, and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had become the director of Naval Intelligence in September 1974.
But the CIA had pushed the project forward nonetheless. The agency's only apparent concession to the Golf's condition was to replace some of the Glomar's grasping claws with a huge scoop. The CIA was hoping to blindly sweep up something significant among the broken pieces.
Colby told none of this to the newspaper editors. All he said was that, given a second chance, the CIA could have recovered the submarine, or at least important chunks of the conning tower and missile bay. Later, Colby said that he didn't remember ever examining the Seawolf photographs himself and that he was relying instead on the analysis of his technical experts.
"We were all very convinced that if we could get back we could get something," Colby said. "Otherwise, why the hell go for it? It wouldn't have made any sense."
What he may have failed to take into account was that his experts were far from objective. They had spent years on Project Jennifer, had been responsible for its huge cost, and in the end they could easily have been more concerned about their professional lives than the lives of the Glomar crewmen. Colby himself knew that the CIA couldn't afford another embarrassment, not when it was suffering politically from other disclosures.
12
The Soviets had good reason to want the story quashed. Losing a sub and failing to find it was bad enough. It was even worse that the Americans had found it and tried to wrench it from the ocean, and worse still that the best Soviet intelligence officers had read about that in American newspapers. But making the whole matter even more humiliating was the fact that the Soviets had been forewarned about Project Jennifer — and ignored the warning. When
Despite Colby’s intelligence that no hostile vessels had come near
When
Shtyrov never knew that his boss had crucial corroborating evidence sitting in his office. A note had been passed beneath the door of the Soviet embassy in Washington. It read: “Certain special services are taking steps to raise the Soviet submarine which sank in the Pacific.” It was signed, “A well-wisher.” The embassy sent a coded copy of the note to Moscow, where officials forwarded it to none other than Admiral Smirnov, who stashed it unheeded in his safe.
The story remained safe until the Soviet newspaper