Neither Confirm nor Deny by M. Todd Bennett (chapter 1)

How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency

THE OLD LINES

Without secrecy the CIA was “not worth a plugged nickel,” Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) drawled in response to calls to strengthen congressional oversight of intelligence, which at the time was limited to small, informal subcommittees of each chamber’s Appropriations and Armed Services Committees. Russell, a staunch segregationist, was on the wrong side of civil rights history. But he remained a formidable presence on Capitol Hill when the submarine project entered the pipeline. A member of Congress since 1933, he continued to exert a great deal of influence, especially behind the scenes, in matters of defense policy, national security, and intelligence. The Senate’s CIA subcommittees jointly acted as one under his chairmanship, as they had for years. He also used his position to protect the agency from scrutiny. According to his biographer, “Russell had almost a phobia for military security and for a high degree of independence by the Central Intelligence Agency.”1

America could not afford closer accountability, Russell insisted—not when it was battling the Soviet Union, a ruthless adversary whose security services were not known for following rules of fair play. To keep Americans safe, the CIA had to operate in the shadows, be they in the halls of

Congress or the streets of Moscow. The smallest indiscretion could compromise U.S. assets, a possibility that required Russell to take every security precaution, from convening subcommittees unannounced in executive session, to keeping minimal records, to leaving the annual CIA outlay unpublished. “No,” he answered those who insisted that American taxpayers— and their duly elected representatives—had a right to know more. “We have not told the country, and I do not propose to tell the country in the future, because if there is anything in the United States which should be held sacred behind the curtain of classified matter, it is information regarding the activities of this agency.”2

Russell practiced what he preached throughout his tenure as the CIA’s foremost ally on the Hill. His archived papers, which run into the thousands of boxes, contain only a smattering of intelligence-related files. But by the late 1960s, the septuagenarian, a lifelong smoker, suffered from severe emphysema. He was growing forgetful. So, his staff tucked little index cards inside his breast pocket, each bearing typewritten notes reminding him to take his medicine, call his doctor, or convene a meeting. Some cards include handwritten notes on which Russell specified additional details, like the subject of a certain discussion or the title of a recommended book, like Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death. Most simply list his daily schedule: “10:30 CIA Subcmte,” one reads; “3:00 Richard Helms,” reads another.3

As inscrutable as they are, the cards can be paired with other sources to track the path the submarine project took through Russell’s system of intelligence oversight, such as it was. Generally paperless to deter outside scrutiny, that system of closed-door meetings, smoke-filled rooms, and handshake deals remains difficult for historians to document. Rapidly decaying, it would soon succumb to the weight of the very intelligence abuses that reformers always claimed it enabled. For better or worse, though, Russell’s was the system in place at the time the sub-raising mission got underway, and it effectively empowered a small network of senior lawmakers to appropriate millions of taxpayer dollars for a scheme involving a giant claw, without anyone seriously questioning whether it was a wise investment.

Richard Helms did not share many confidences with lawmakers. Charged with protecting the nation’s intelligence secrets, he said as little as possible so as to avoid leaks. He once misled Congress to protect a particularly controversial covert activity, thereby earning himself a criminal charge, but also the respect of the supporters who lionized him as “the man who kept the secrets.” 4

Besides, at no point during his tenure as director of central intelligence (DCI), which lasted from 1966 to 1973, was he under any legal obligation to keep lawmakers in the loop. The CIA’s founding statute, the National Security Act of 1947, made DCIs (and the agency generally) answerable only to the National Security Council, the White House body also created by the act to coordinate the interagency process of foreign policymaking and to advise the president on national security issues. Other than acknowledging the Senate’s role in confirming nominees to serve as DCI, the act included no language requiring any administration official to notify Congress about agency activity. 5

Helms did sometimes discuss sensitive matters, though. Not with Congress as a whole, or even each chamber’s intelligence subcommittees, but their chairs and, perhaps, ranking minority members. Helms held these discussions, he explained, when a proposed operation was especially “dicey, tricky, or might fail” and he wanted to “hold hands” with Congress. A DCI sounded out lawmakers to determine “how far he may go” in questionable activities. Without obtaining preapproval, and the political cover that came with it, a DCI was left out on a limb, where he felt “very lonely indeed” if something went wrong.6

With its estimated 10 percent chance of success, the submarine operation certainly qualified as dicey. Legislative files show that Helms reached out to hold hands with House Appropriations chair George Mahon (D-Texas), among other key lawmakers, during the operation’s early days. But he cultivated Russell in particular because Russell was singularly influential. With the exception of a two-year stint during the Eisenhower administration, when Republicans briefly formed a majority, Russell chaired the Armed Services Committee from 1951 to 1969, a seat he gave up that year only to chair Appropriations, the Senate’s other standing committee

FIGURE 1.1 Senator Richard Russell and Richard Helms chat on June 23, 1966, as the Senate held hearings to confirm Helms’s appointment as director of central intelligence.

Source : Associated Press.

with intelligence oversight responsibilities. Throughout much of that time, the two committees’ CIA subcommittees jointly acted as one under his leadership, an arrangement that gave him unmatched authority over intelligence. “Generally speaking,” recalled the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, “it was sufficient simply to tell Senator Russell that you were doing it, and no one else, and it never leaked.” 7

Perhaps Helms pulled Russell aside after the CIA subcommittee met on July 16, 1968, to brief him about the sub-raising effort.8 By that time U.S. naval intelligence— alerted by a massive but failed Soviet search conducted by dozens of ships and aircraft over a two-month period—had determined

that a Soviet Golf II– class ballistic missile submarine had gone down in March in the central North Pacific.9 Designated K-129 by the Soviets, the Golf was one of four subs that disappeared that year, still the deadliest for submariners since World War II. Incidents at sea occurred all too frequently at the time, fueling speculation that the K-129 had collided with another ship, an American sub perhaps. Or maybe it simply suffered a battery explosion, snorkel failure, missile accident, or other such catastrophic malfunction. The cause remains disputed today.10

American officers may not have known for sure what downed the G- 722 (they identified the Golf by its hull number, 722). Unlike the Soviets, though, they knew exactly where its wreckage was located. Using a network of hydrophone arrays and acoustic sensors maintained by the U.S. Navy and Air Force to track Soviet submarines and missile tests, analysts geolocated the Golf near the coordinates of 40° north, 180° west some 1,560 nautical miles northwest of Pearl Harbor.11

According to Blind Man’s Bluff, journalists Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew’s account of American underwater espionage, a U.S. spy submarine, the USS Halibut, set out to surveil the site in July. It reportedly returned with photographs—twenty-two thousand top-secret photos that officially do not exist and that have never been released by the U.S. government— showing the wreckage damaged and split into sections. They showed “a hole blown nearly ten feet wide, just behind the Golf’s conning tower.” One of the sub’s three missiles had been reduced to “twisted pipe.” Another was missing altogether. But the “third silo was intact.”

Lying on its starboard side, some 16,500 feet below water on a relatively flat surface, the G- 722 appeared to be in surprisingly good condition, given everything it had been through. The “submarine looked basically intact,” Sontag and Drew’s sources said. Officials targeted the sub’s forwardmost section extending from the sail to the bow, because it was most valuable from the intelligence standpoint. According to an engineer who had access to photos and video recordings of the wreckage, the section measured approximately 160 feet long, 64 feet wide, and 55 feet high, and weighed almost two thousand tons.12

in 1974 , the Glomar Explorer, ostensibly an advanced deep-sea mining vessel owned by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, lowered a claw-like device into the Pacific Ocean. But this was only a cover story for an even more improbable scheme: a CIA mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. One of the most ambitious operations in intelligence history, this episode marks a key moment in the history of international espionage and government transparency. With keen historical analysis and gripping storytelling, M. Todd Bennett plumbs the depths of government secrecy in this new account of the mission that created the Glomar response: “We can neither confirm nor deny. . . .”

“This is intelligence history as it should be written: packed with new archival findings and thrillingly narrated yet also deeply engaged with the latest scholarship in the wider fields of U.S. history and America in the world. A must-read for academic historians and espionage buffs alike.”

—Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

“Bennett shows why the story of the Glomar Explorer is not only filled with exciting characters and twists, it’s also a key moment in the history of the U.S. government’s refusal to disclose information to the voters.”

—Kathryn S. Olmsted, author of The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler

“Neither Confirm nor Deny is an extraordinary account of one of the most important moments in the history of the CIA, the Glomar Explorer mission. Likely to become a classic in the field of the history of intelligence, it vividly underlines the continuing tensions that exist between democratic transparency and the American national-security state.”

—Thomas A. Schwartz, author of Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography

“From the murky depths of the 1970s, this riveting book surfaces not only a Soviet sub and its CIA salvagers but also a new reckoning with an era known for investigative transparency. Glomar’s legacy instead was to anchor the media, politicians, and all Americans to a barnacled ship of state secrecy.”

—Katherine A. S. Sibley, coeditor of Post–Cold War Revelations and the American Communist Party: Citizens, Revolutionaries, and Spies

M. TODD BENNETT is associate professor of history at East Carolina University. He is the author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (2012). Bennett was formerly a historian at the U.S. Department of State; there, he edited the Foreign Relations of the United States volume that includes declassified records documenting the Glomar incident.

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Cover design: Chang Jae LeeCover image: Hughes Glomar Explorer at sea

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