7 
7 It started out as a bad day,” the President said to me as I met with him in the Oval Office the morning of March 19, 1975, “and it’s getting worse.”1
In the dozen-plus years I had known Gerald Ford, that was one of the rare times I had seen him down—even dejected. An epic problem was erupting, one that threatened to damage the country he led and consume the energy of his still young administration. It involved national security, specifically, and the public disclosure of revelations concerning an extremely sensitive top-secret CIA mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine and its contents from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
“You haven’t heard the half of it,” I replied. “Wait until you read the Evening Star.”2 I handed him a copy of the latest edition of what was then Washington’s evening newspaper of record. Weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times had speculated about a covert submarine mission in a front-page article. (Its headline: “US REPORTED AFTER RUSS SUB.”)3 The Evening Star’s follow-up article stated that the mission had been “approved at the very highest level—by Henry A. Kissinger.”
One of the nation’s closely guarded secrets being thrust into the glaring light of public scrutiny was more than enough to exasperate a Commander in Chief. Most worrisome, of course, was what was threatening to come next: the release of highly classified information that would do damage to America’s international relations. The story had begun seven years earlier when an unpublicized catastrophe on the high seas led to one of the most daring and innovative intelligence operations of the Cold War.
* * *
On March 8, 1968, when Lyndon Johnson was president and Gerald Ford and I were still in Congress, K-129, a Golf II–class diesel-electric-powered Soviet submarine, was sailing fifteen hundred miles northwest of Hawaii when it sank, killing ninety-eight Russian sailors aboard. The Soviet Union promptly launched a frantic effort to locate the sub, which contained their classified codebooks and three SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. They failed. The U.S. Navy, alerted to the spike in Soviet activity in the area, initiated a secret mission to try to find the Soviet sub. They succeeded. Actually retrieving the wreckage of the ship and its sensitive contents, nonetheless, proved an undertaking of an entirely different magnitude.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 1971 that President Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, gave a green light to a nascent CIA project, codenamed AZORIAN. The highly classified mission involved constructing a vessel capable of clandestinely retrieving the Soviet sub K-129. Construction of the impressive new vessel took more than three years. It was designed and constructed by Global Marine Development at the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, a subsidiary of the Summa Corporation. The company was owned by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. A whopping 619 feet long and 36,000 tons, the ship featured a giant mechanical claw, the “capture vehicle”—lovingly called Clementine—designed to grasp and then raise the 1,750-ton, 132-foot-long Soviet submarine from the depths and then tuck it into the belly of the ship.
In a careful effort to conceal the true purpose of the American ship as it sailed the Pacific Ocean, an elaborate cover story had been devised. The CIA arranged with Howard Hughes to claim his company was building the vessel to mine “manganese nodules” from the ocean floor. Theoretically, the mineral deposits could in turn be refined and sold to form alloys in steel production. As part of the audacious and commercially dubious mining mission, the vessel was overtly christened the Hughes Glomar Explorer. (“Glomar” was a truncated form of the name of the Global Marine Development Company). Security surrounding the Glomar Explorer was extremely tight. Only a small number of clearances were granted. Even then, only a small percentage of those involved in construction knew the Glomar was actually a classified instrument of the Cold War, rather than another pet project of an eclectic industrial titan.
President Nixon had given approval to launch the AZORIAN operation on June 7, 1974, two months before he resigned and only three weeks prior to his trip to Moscow, during which he would sign the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting tests of nuclear devices with yields exceeding 150 kilotons. To avoid damaging the Nixon-Kissinger trademark policy of détente, one of his administration’s key foreign policy initiatives, Nixon expressly instructed that the effort to recover K-129 not begin until after his return from the Soviet Union.4 The treaty was signed on July 3, 1974, and the Glomar Explorer arrived at the recovery site the next day.
The salvage operation was carried on for more than a month, and twice was within a hair’s breadth of being exposed. The first close call came when a nearby British merchant ship requested medical assistance for a stricken crew member—which U.S. personnel aboard the Glomar provided. The second, and more ominous, occurred when a Soviet missile range instrumentation ship, the Chazhma, made its way toward the remote site of the recovery effort. Amid concerns that the Soviets might have discovered their mission, and might even attempt to seize the Glomar Explorer, the American crew was ordered to quickly destroy all of their classified material in case of a boarding by the Soviets.5
The Chazhma’s behavior, which was unusual, only added to the tension. The Soviet vessel was equipped with a helicopter, which made several low-level passes while photographing the Glomar. At one point, the Soviet vessel sent a message to the Americans.
“We are on our way home and heard your fog horn. What are you doing here?”
“We are conducting ocean mining tests—deep-ocean mining tests,” replied the crew of the Glomar.
“What kind of vessel are you?”
“A deep-ocean mining vessel.”
“How much time will you be here?”
“We expect to finish testing in two to three weeks.”
Finally, after what must have seemed like an eternity to the American crew, the Chazhma communicated, “I wish you all the best.”6 The vessel steamed away.
Despite that fortunate break, project AZORIAN did not go entirely according to plan. On Glomar’s attempt to raise the Soviet’s K-129 submarine, more than three-quarters of the vessel broke off and plunged back to the ocean floor. Only a thirty-eight-foot-long forward section made it into the Glomar. As it happened, the failed recovery effort took place on August 9, 1974—the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. If the attempt to recover a sunken sub at the risk of triggering a superpower crisis sounds like a story plot, there’s a reason. The Glomar episode inspired, at least in part, two: the 1977 movie rendition of Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me and author Tom Clancy’s 1984 debut novel, The Hunt for Red October. Revelation of America’s real-life salvage endeavor, however, was an unwanted real-life drama for the new president, who had inherited not only a serious publicity nightmare but an intelligence coup that threatened to be undone by media exposure.
On August 10, Gerald R. Ford’s first full day as President, he convened a National Security Council meeting. The meeting primarily dealt with roles and responsibilities. But after the meeting, I put only a very vague cryptic reference to a submarine matter in my notes—purposely so, for reasons of security. The next day, Ford gave the go-ahead for the recovered section of K-129 to be brought back to Long Beach, California, on a classified, close-hold basis.7
For months, a few reporters had been asking around about the operation, having caught wind of it after a bizarre robbery of a safe at the Summa Corporation’s California headquarters. Bill Colby, the CIA Director, had managed to convince reporters to hold off on printing any story in the interest of national security. That understanding began to fall apart in December 1974, when other disclosures about covert American intelligence activities came to light, creating a growing national security problem for the new administration.
* * *
On December 22, 1974, The New York Times ran an explosive front-page article, stating that the CIA, under then Director Richard Helms, had spied on American citizens during the Nixon presidency. The article asserted that “the Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter . . . conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States.”8 Under pressure, Helms’s successor, Bill Colby, and the CIA General Counsel briefed the Justice Department nine days later. They disclosed eighteen so-called skeletons in the closet, adding they were “trying to track down more details about the various skeletons.” Among other revelations, the CIA was said to have wiretapped some journalists, physically surveilled reporters, and “plotted” the assassination of foreign leaders. According to the article, the Agency had even conducted warrantless break-ins and entries at the homes of former CIA employees.9 The undocumented allegations reawakened questions about a possible CIA role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Colby, the paper also reported, was considering recommending legal action against those allegedly involved in domestic spying.10
The disclosures, unsurprisingly, led to a public outcry, and a number of individuals in government took steps to try to save their careers. Leaks occurred left and right. So many revelations were coming out simultaneously that many officials began wondering whether the U.S. government would be able to keep any of its classified information out of the press. Classified guidance on delicate arms control negotiations with the Soviets, for instance, ended up in the pages of The New York Times.11 Still only a few months into the Ford presidency with very few new personnel in place, it wasn’t certain who in the White House touching classified papers had received the necessary security clearances.12 Career and non-career officials seemed to have discovered how it was possible to anonymously preempt, weaken, or even shift a President’s policy position in a negotiation with a timely leak to the media.13
Henry Kissinger, rightly concerned about the international implications of America’s secrets hitting the media, urged President Ford to launch an FBI investigation into the series of damaging national security leaks. That was an understandable impulse. But President Ford expressed concerns about the previous administration’s handling of leaks, when investigative agencies were requested to engage in investigations to advance political interests. Indeed, “stopping leaks” was a primary goal of the infamous “plumbers” operation that was a part of the Watergate scandal. President Ford decided it was best to assign responsibility for dealing with the leaks to the relevant Cabinet officers, rather than conducting investigations from the White House.14
With sensitive matters being leaked to the media, the situation was serious, and the President knew he needed to take determined action to quell concerns among the American people. At that same time the Watergate drama was being rekindled. The trials of Nixon’s former top aides and my former colleagues, John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, were under way, with them ultimately being convicted of a series of felonies for their roles in the Watergate cover-up, including obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and perjury.
Meeting with top aides in the Oval Office on the evening of January 3, 1975, President Ford directed us to assemble a presidential panel to examine the charges revealed in The New York Times and to investigate the actions and activities of the CIA to ensure the agency was operating within the law.15 My hastily written note from that meeting included the following:
MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT
January 3, 1975
10:45 to 11:10 a.m.
Oval Office
Nessen, Marsh
We talked about the CIA. The President, Marsh, Buchen and Kissinger met on the subject this morning and agreed on the approach . . . that the President will call in the appropriate Department and Agency heads early next week, tell [them] how he wants their departments and agencies managed with respect to this subject, ask them to get back to him with assurance that that’s the way they are presently being administered, that he will take the appropriate governmental action to see that any wrongdoing is referred to the Department of Justice. . . .
That he will create a special panel of citizens to look into the matter with respect to the past to assure him as to what the status is at the present and to make any recommendations to him with respect to safeguards for the future. . . .
That in the event that the Congress creates a Joint Committee on the subject of or even with respect to their present oversight Committees, he assures them that the Administration and the Citizens panel will cooperate fully with them. . . .
That the President . . . feels that this is an important subject because of the importance of an intelligence gathering capability to the United States of America in the world environment that exists. On the other hand he also feels that it is important that that intelligence gathering activity continue on a basis that is consistent with the laws and with the political code of the country and he intends to see that that is the case.16
While I certainly agreed that “the CIA had to operate in a lawful manner and ways consistent with statutes,” I discussed with the President the CIA’s need to “to engage in covert activities,” given the nature of the world. In other words, transparency can become dangerous at a certain point. People who understood that critical balance were needed on the proposed panel. “We didn’t have time to horse around with this thing,” I noted at the time. “It could do great damage to the country if all covert activities in the US government were subject to public scrutiny . . . and the United States foreign policy would be undermined.”17
Ford summoned CIA Director Bill Colby to the Oval Office on January 3, 1975. Jack Marsh, Counselor to the President, was also present. Marsh noted that Colby was visibly nervous. Because Colby had been required to spend so much time testifying on Capitol Hill, at one point he accidentally called the President “Mr. Chairman.”18 Colby was defensive but forthright in backing many of the claims in the New York Times account. “We [the CIA] have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders,” Colby said, adding, “We have never succeeded.” He cited Fidel Castro of Cuba, for one.19
The next day the President was informed that Colby’s predecessor, Richard Helms, was “irate” at Colby for his public disclosures of activities that occurred on Helms’s watch and made “verbal ultimatums” that seemed to threaten, obliquely, to implicate others in the administration.20 Colby had been in charge of covert activities during a portion of the Vietnam War and may have felt a need to explain some of the Agency’s more controversial operations. In any event, a concerned President Ford had had enough of the back and forth in the administration and the resulting outside speculation.
“We have been struggling for two weeks with the consequences of the [New York Times] article,” Ford said. “We have come up with three things: I am writing to each intelligence officer to tell them: ‘Here is the law and you are expected to obey it.’ Second, we will establish a Blue Ribbon Committee to look into these allegations. Third, I will urge Congress to investigate this either by an existing committee or a joint committee.”21
Deeply concerned about damage from the original leaks, and what he appeared to believe had been Colby’s role, particularly in referring matters to the Justice Department, Kissinger was among those suggesting a firmer hand. Kissinger said that Colby should be given guidance as to what to say on Capitol Hill. We thought that would be unwise, and the President should not do that. The President said if anyone thinks he should do it, they should put it in writing. No one did.22
I suggested to the President that he needed to get the issue out of his in-box. “Here we are, probably about twenty staff guys in the White House doing nothing except handling this issue for the past couple of weeks,” I said. “You’ve got a country to run. The economy. Energy problems, foreign policy problems. A tough Congress to deal with.”
Ford appreciated that, but he wanted to be sure the issue was given the appropriate attention. He recognized the seriousness of the matter. If more covert activities of the U.S. government were exposed to public scrutiny, then our entire intelligence operations would be undermined. I suggested that he put someone he trusted in charge of a presidential-appointed panel—I suggested Vice President Nelson Rockefeller—and leave the day-to-day work on the matter to them.23
After considerable discussion among the key figures in the White House and in the Congress, the President’s intelligence panel was selected. It consisted of eight distinguished members: former Commerce Secretary John Connor, former Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, who had served as a member of the Executive Committee of the NSC during the Cuban Missile Crisis, former U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, labor union leader Lane Kirkland, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO General Lyman Lemnitzer, and former University of Virginia president Edward Shannon, Jr. This list also included a notable entry in California Governor Ronald Reagan, who was finishing his second term in office and was the topic of widespread rumors about his possible plans to challenge Ford for the Republican nomination for the Presidency.
By early January, the committee of eight members was announced and the newly installed Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, was named the Chairman. This prevented a potentially awkward moment, since Governor Reagan, a strong conservative, was a vocal opponent of the liberal Rockefeller; indeed, some aides warned Ford that Reagan might bolt the committee if he were not told in advance that Rockefeller would be the chairman.24 Reagan was so informed, at Ford’s direction, and he stayed on the board. On January 4, 1975, Ford issued Executive Order 11828 to establish what became known as the “Rockefeller Commission” on CIA activities. The goal was for the commission to complete its business by March.
Trouble struck not long after, prolonging matters. On January 16, the President met with editors from The New York Times for an off-the-record chat. At one point, he said the commission had come across CIA operations that would “make your hair curl.” “Like what?” managing editor A. M. Rosenthal asked. “Like assassinations,” Ford responded. Despite the conversation’s notably unambiguous ground rules, the President’s private comment, seeming to indicate new information about the CIA’s potential involvement in political assassinations, spread all over Washington.25 To the administration’s disappointment, an unambiguous understanding of the term “off the record” did not still exist in Washington in the months after Watergate. Daniel Schorr, in his CBS news broadcast, reported Ford’s remark on February 28, 1975. My assistant Dick Cheney promptly advised Press Secretary Ron Nessen to “refuse all comment,” which he did.26 President Ford also punted in his future interactions with the media. Still, an investigation into alleged past CIA assassination plans was tacked on to the Rockefeller Commission’s agenda. Finer parsing of the President’s exchange with The New York Times suggested something even more disturbing about the management of the executive branch: the White House had, on occasion, likely been out of the loop about activities by one of the government’s covert agencies.
I made it a mission to help ensure that the President and the White House would not get caught off-guard again. I advised the President to instruct the heads of all agencies to put their respective employees on notice that they had an obligation to report on anything “that’s being done that is illegal or in a gray area.” My rationale to the President, as I noted in a memo: “You don’t run around telling your four-year-old daughter, ‘Don’t stick a pencil in your ear,’ because you never imagined she would. It may be that they are out there sticking pencils in their ears, and the only way you will know is if you ask them what the hell they are doing.”27
Meanwhile, there was another major disclosure in the offing, which threatened to further damage the government and U.S. foreign policy in general. Long submerged in the murky waters of the intelligence community, the story of the Glomar finally was coming to the surface.
* * *
The agreement Colby had brokered with reporters regarding the sunken Soviet submarine ended on February 7, 1975, when the Los Angeles Times, unable to resist a news story involving Howard Hughes and the CIA, published its first article on the U.S. clandestine recovery effort.28 In a race against further revelations hitting the newspaper—and alerting the Soviet Union about American activities surrounding their lost submarine—a second recovery operation was proposed, codenamed MATADOR, to try to retrieve the remainder of the K-129. Regrettably, the time for that ran out.
The White House press office immediately began getting peppered with questions that, after the Watergate investigations, had an all-too-familiar ring: What did the President know? And when did he know it?
Like others in government, I had issues with press stories—let alone the media exposés—that relied heavily on anonymous sources. They tended to exaggerate differences and advance personal political agendas, especially when the sources could hide behind labels such as “senior administration official” or “source who asked to remain anonymous.” But in the case of the AZORIAN project, it wasn’t just egos that were threatened. There was the potential to generate serious problems between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, creating tensions not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis a decade earlier. Leaks about the project also threatened to lead to the exposure of still more delicate matters involving our country’s intelligence activities and, in turn, compromise U.S. intelligence operations and possibly the security of U.S. operatives overseas. And, of course, the media speculation had the added drawback of occasionally being true.
The President considered the range of advice he was receiving from his senior aides about the best course of action. One possibility was to simply take full ownership of the AZORIAN project and provide a full accounting of U.S. activities. Phil Buchen, Ford’s White House Counsel, favored that approach. Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger favored it as well.29 A former CIA Director himself, Jim saw full disclosure as a spur to patriotism, for the Glomar was, in his words and in fact, a technical “marvel.” Further, the Soviets, he added, did not have clean hands on such matters. It had raised a British submarine back in the 1920s, but also repaired it and used it in the Soviet navy. The truth, Jim argued, was going to emerge eventually anyway, and likely sooner rather than later. At that point, some forty-five hundred government employees were aware of the AZORIAN project, and up to one hundred Members of Congress and staff on Capitol Hill had already been briefed on it.30 “There are so many people who have to be briefed on covert operations, it is bound to leak,” Henry Kissinger reminded President Ford in a January 1975 meeting. “There is no one with guts left. All of yesterday they were making a record to protect themselves about AZORIAN.”31
A more limited disclosure approach was floated as another option for the President’s consideration. This involved briefing additional people on Capitol Hill and friendly foreign governments on the operation, but without giving a full accounting to the press. Careful and selective introduction to AZORIAN, some estimated, might help preclude blindsiding friends, alienating potential allies, and strengthening the opposition of adversaries. No one wanted a repeat of the kind of media backlash Ford received after the “surprise” pardon of Nixon.
The full disclosure route was most in keeping with his nature and instincts. It also fit the ethos of his administration, which had worked to separate itself from the impressions of the secretive patterns of prior administrations.
Yet public admission entailed significant and unusual hazards. Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s assistant at the NSC, was opposed to acknowledging AZORIAN. Counselor Jack Marsh and Director Bill Colby were as well.32 Colby warned acknowledgment might re-create the dynamics of the 1960 U-2 spy plane incident with Gary Powers, putting public pressure on the Soviet Union to aggressively respond to this “affront” to its sovereignty.33 Opening up publicly might also mean laying down diplomatic land mines for the President before his scheduled meeting with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in several months in Helsinki, Finland.34 The two leaders were set to sign the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), negotiations that had been under way for nearly two years. Full disclosure of the project also risked the ire of the Soviets at a time when the President and particularly Secretary Kissinger were working hard to achieve a nuclear arms limitation agreement between the two superpowers.
Then there was a third approach, which Kissinger and I favored: to “neither confirm nor deny.” (It has since been suggested this might have been one of the early uses of that phrase now in the popular lexicon.) We agreed with Bill Colby that it probably wasn’t wise to publicly confirm AZORIAN. Doing so could unnecessarily put the Soviets on the spot and conceivably disrupt the evolving U.S.-Soviet relationship. We also believed that endorsing AZORIAN would publicly verify our country’s considerable underwater capabilities, which had already yielded important intelligence on the Soviet Union and other nations. Public acknowledgment, we believed, would also further validate leakers—those who had compromised classified information as reliable sources, and possibly incentivize them and others to expose still more secrets in the future. Finally, we were also concerned it would almost certainly raise humanitarian issues about the ninety-eight Soviet crewmen whose remains were still inside K-129, which was functionally their underwater coffin.
This, too, had risks, of course. White House silence or unwillingness to be forthright with reporters could incite charges that Nixon’s secretive presidency had returned. Some would undoubtedly wonder whether the new administration, like its discredited predecessor, was seeking to cover up other activities—possibly even some illegal ones. And then there was the problem of the Soviets. Regardless of how the White House responded, the story was now public enough that the leaders in Moscow certainly hadn’t missed it. Might they unmask the project to the world on their own timetable to try to maximize embarrassment to the President and the U.S.?
The President considered the various options carefully, asked probing questions, and made a decision that would have ramifications for years to come. He chose the third approach, proposed by Kissinger—to neither confirm nor deny—while fully aware of the distinct risks associated with nonconfirmation, as the press finally broke the story wide open.
On March 17, Lloyd Shearer, columnist for Parade magazine, sent a message to Bill Colby, notifying him that the story was “all over” the National Press Building.35 Syndicated columnist and commentator Jack Anderson “broke” the Glomar story the following day with a report during his syndicated radio program on the Mutual Radio Network. Then The New York Times ran a front-page article by Seymour Hersh, “CIA Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles.”36 Reporters began swarming Long Beach where the Glomar was parked.
As the Glomar operation came to light, so, too, did other intelligence matters long thought to have been put to rest. The inevitable result of the various investigations, especially into the world of covert activities, was that more and more intelligence information began to be available in the media. The Rockefeller Commission, originally charged with looking into allegations about the CIA, was now dipping its toes into the work of the Warren Commission. President Ford, of course, was one of the few surviving who had served as a member. The Warren Commission, assembled by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the death of John F. Kennedy, had concluded that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. That was a controversial conclusion, one that was still being put to the test.
MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT
March 20, 1975
2:05 to 3:10 p.m.
Present: Vice President, Marsh, Brent Scowcroft, Buchen and Rumsfeld
The Vice President discussed some of the work of the panel, CIA and a conclusion or two of his, one of which was that he has concluded without any evidence, and because of that anyone would have to deny it as a fact, but he has personally concluded that Castro and the Communists were involved in some way in both Kennedy deaths.37
That conclusion by Rockefeller, which he himself admitted was unsubstantiated, threatened to open up a new can of worms—with Ford being drawn in directly. First the Glomar episode reawakened questions about the murky relationship between Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon. Now there was a new implication that the Warren Commission might not have told the American people everything they believed about the death of President Kennedy. Not for a minute did I believe President Ford would have willingly withheld information from the public, other than for some truly important national security reasons. His concern was that he might not know all the information either.
Many conspiracy theorists long have believed that either the Soviet Union or the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, or possibly both, could have been somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination. The fact that Oswald may have been in closer contact with the Cubans than was publicly known, and might have been privy to confidential CIA information about its activities in Cuba, certainly would raise questions. The President in particular was concerned by the possibility that the CIA had kept such information from members of the Warren Commission. If in fact they had, Ford wondered, was it conceivable that they might now be doing something similar to both the Congress and the President?
In February 1976, eight months after the Rockefeller Commission’s report had been released to the public and President Ford had made further changes in his Cabinet late the prior year, he announced plans to reorganize the intelligence community. The barrage of leaks, new levels of scrutiny, and congressional investigations being led by Congressman Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church had damaged agency morale, especially in the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence unit, and had promised to affect U.S. handling of covert operations for some time to come.
As for the Glomar Explorer, it was kept mothballed for more than a quarter-century before being restored by a U.S. petroleum company for deep-sea oil drilling and exploration. The CIA, while recognizing that the AZORIAN project failed to meet all of its intelligence objectives, still properly considers the project to have been “one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.”38