Carl Duckett, the CIA's chief official on the Glomar project, has died, leaving his views on the odds of success for the second phase of Project Jennifer a mystery. CIA records on Project Jennifer are still classified. And Duckett's top deputy, Zeke Zelmer, has refused to discuss the matter. Colby died in 1996, but insisted to the end that a second recovery attempt could have been profitable.
But the former Navy officers believe that the CIA officials were desperate to believe their own myth, desperate to believe that victory was still possible and they had not wasted so much money.
Craven's theory is far more blunt. "It was just a big, fat plum that looked juicy," he says. "And they turned loose some guys who as far as the ocean was concerned were a bunch of amateurs."
About that, Hersh agreed with Craven. His already well-honed cynicism sharpened, Hersh began digging into the Navy's regular submarine operations, and in May 1975 he published an account of Holystone, of submarine trailing and surveillance missions taking place in or near Soviet waters.
Hersh also revealed that there had been a number of collisions between U.S. and Soviet subs, that a U.S. spy sub had once grounded briefly in the approaches to Vladivostok harbor and that some White House and CIA officials were questioning whether the flood of U.S. submarines in Soviet waters made sense in the age of detente. After his story appeared, he received a call from a man who had been on Gato during its collision with the Soviet Hotel in 1969, and Hersh published an account of that in early July. By this time, Congress was looking into intelligence abuses. The Senate, led by Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, was investigating incidents included in a CIA document that catalogued its own abuses-from domestic spying to international assassination attempts. Church had already unnerved the once-proud and untouchable agency, calling it "a rogue elephant."
But the intelligence community was more worried about an investigation in the House, where a New York Democrat, Otis G. Pike, was leading his own broader investigation, looking at Kissinger, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and the Navy. He also was setting out to gauge the value of the Navy's submarine spying efforts-something no other congressman had attempted in the thirty years since the cold war began.
Pike, fifty-three, was a maverick and a jokester, but more important, he was cheap. He always wore old suits in various stages of disrepair, usually serious disrepair. And he was a man who years earlier had speared the Navy for gross overspending in cartoonish depictions of admirals collecting hazard flight pay for the dangers they encountered sitting at their desks. It was Pike's investigating that led to the running jokes about toilet seats and wrenches that cost the military hundreds of dollars. When he took over the House investigation into intelligence activities, the press touted him as the consummate outsider, despite the fact that he was a product of Princeton University and Columbia University School of Law, a longtime member of the House Armed Services Committee, and a Marine war hero.
Pike was now promising that in just six months he would scrutinize cold war spying. For the submarine force, that meant Pike was threatening to poke into trailings, incursions into foreign territorial waters, and collisions. The Navy was worried that he would publicize its most classified missions. After all, he had led the House investigation into the Pueblo fiasco, determining that a gross lack of analysis and oversight was responsible for placing the spy ship in harm's way off the coast of North Korea.
Perhaps another congressman would have planned such an ambitious investigation in oak-lined conference rooms or over scotch in one of Washington's private clubs, the kind that don't bother to put the prices on their menus. But Pike planned his investigation sitting in his skivvies over supermarket beer with Aaron B. Donner, his longtime campaign manager, in the small apartment near Capitol Hill that they shared as a Washington, D.C., residence since their families were still living in Long Island. They plotted strategy with the enthusiasm of students plotting their first campus demonstration. True to Pike's character, they decided that he would attack the nation's most powerful intelligence agencies with a cost-benefit analysis.
Pike's congressional committee was backed by a young staff, several of them fresh from the Watergate inquiry. They brought with them a deep distrust for the political establishment, for authority, and especially for anything stamped "secret." These staffers were irreverent. They were brazen. They were Pike's marauders.
They began asking questions: What do the intelligence agencies do? What do they cost taxpayers? How much use do they get out of the massive amount of information they collect? And weren't a lot of their risky and expensive ventures just plain redundant?
One of the most obvious places to start was Project Jennifer, which struck Pike as a massive failure at best, or an all-out boondoggle, a blank check written to the Howard Hughes corporations, perhaps even a political payoff. Had Craven been privy to Pike's hunches, he would have cheered. As Pike began digging, Colby tried the approach that had seemed to work so well with newspaper editors and that seemed to be working with the Senate. He offered up some details, enough, he hoped, to win over his critics. At a Pike hearing on Project Jennifer, Colby and company put on their best cloak and dagger for the occasion, insisting on a closed room for what was arguably the nation's worst-kept secret.
The congressmen were already in session in the Armed Services Committee hearing room when the CIA contingent arrived. First in was a small army of dour young men wearing dark suits and what looked like buttons in their ears-earphones for their walkie-talkies. They swept the room with electronic gear, searching for bugs in corners and under tables and chairs. Pike and the other congressmen watched transfixed by the living theater.
Then a second, smaller contingent of agents came in, carrying big black suitcases, the sort that museums use for transporting priceless figurines. These men also began to scout the room, though none of the congressmen could figure out what the agents were looking for. It was as though two acts had been staged to make the committee feel a sense of occasion. The effect was working.
Finally, in walked Colby and some of his deputies, triggering Act 3. The cases snapped open, and CIA men began gingerly to lift out large plastic bags, gently placing them on a long table set up before the congressmen. The committee members leaned forward and looked down, peering through the clear plastic at these top-secret items that had been carried here under guard.
A throat might have been cleared here and there, but for the most part the members were silent. Actually, nobody knew quite what to say. The objects laid out so ceremoniously on the table seemed to be nothing more than a collection of metal chunks that looked suspiciously like rusty iron.
The lawmakers examined the chunks, feigning reverence. Despite themselves, they had an overwhelming sense that something momentous was taking place as Colby solemnly announced that they were hefting pieces of a Russian submarine. It was only later that they admitted to one another that they could have been looking at anything, even refuse from a construction site down the street, and the CIA's presentation of charts and ocean diagrams seemed to hold just about as much significance. As for questions of cost and benefit, these Colby deftly evaded with vague explanations that totals were unavailable with most of the funding hidden in other, more mundane budgets. Colby's performance was masterful. By the time the show was over, not a single member of the committee had remembered to raise the question of Howard Hughes.
But the CIA's show left the congressmen with a lingering sense that they had been had. The feeling didn't go away when Colby later tried to impress the committee with a show of secret-agent gear, including what agents called a "micro-bio-inoculator," a device that looked like a gun but shot needles dipped in a drug that attacked the central nervous system. Pike's rebellious staff became outraged by the CIA's antics. If anything, the show put on to justify the Glomar Explorer left the staff more determined than ever to dig into a broad spectrum of submarine missions, and Pike's marauders began looking into the issues Hersh had raised in his stories about Holystone and the Gato collision.