Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (39 page)

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.

Word quickly got around the Navy that Pike wasn't playing by the old rules, or any rules-that he was trying to take a hard look at the most secret operations. Some admirals were recommending that the Navy simply stonewall him. But a few submariners, veteran enlisted men, phoned the committee with stories about submarine groundings, falsified patrol reports, and news of another collision in which a Soviet submarine had been struck and was presumed lost.

The disclosures were unprecedented. Nothing in Pike's tenure on the Armed Services Committee had prepared him for any of this. Most members of that committee were told little about submarines, even about the basic surveillance ops. Before Watergate wrecked the old congressional seniority system and elevated some younger firebrands like Pike, the submarine community had been allowed to run past Congress. When a nod was needed, well, there was always a senator or two who could be counted on to push a program through-especially the late Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who single-handedly oversaw most intelligence programs in the I 960s. (Or as Admiral Moorer, who supported the Glomar operation as CNO and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1967 to 1974, put it: "Generally speaking, in the sixties, it was sufficient simply to tell Senator Russell that you were doing it, and no one else, and it never leaked.")

Things got really interesting when somebody phoned with a description of a submarine that could search deep, a submarine able to sit on a seafloor. It wasn't long before Pike's crew heard about the cable taps recording away beneath the Sea of Okhotsk.

The source was one of the Navy's handpicked elite, one of the men of the Halibut, and he was frightened. He was still in the Navy. He was still hound to secrecy. He was not supposed to be talking to anyone, certainly not a congressman known not only for kicking military tires but for pricing them, scrutinizing them, and complaining loudly and publicly when he found them to be flat. This was, for any submariner, a potentially career-crashing move.

Pike's staffers did what they could to reassure the man. They just asked him to point out what they should explore. The exploration, they promised, would occur through other means. They would confront the Pentagon directly. They saw no reason to haul some low-level guy up before a public committee, no reason to destroy an informant.

And so the submariner talked-of the Bat Cave, of Okhotsk. Then another man from special projects called. In the end, both submariners were actually looking for answers, much as Halibut's chiefs had been when White refused to get back on the sub in Guam. They wanted to know how invading Soviet waters and planting the telephone tap to end all telephone taps during talk of detente was going to accomplish anything. They wanted to know why they were being asked to sit as targets in a Soviet sea. They wanted to know whether the submarine command had become overzealous and reckless, whether their lives were being risked in patently illegal operations. They were sworn to go in harm's way. This they accepted. But they wanted to know, why these risks, why this mission? They especially wanted to know why they were being sent to a Soviet sea in two of the oldest and loudest submarines in the fleet. By this point in late 1975, Halibut had completed her last mission and was going to be taken out of service entirely. Seawolf, the boat taking Halibut's place, was turning out to be even more of a clunker.

As Pike's team began to follow up on these concerns, one of his most driven young staffers, Edward Roeder III, was assigned to take the lead. Admiral James L. Holloway III, who was now the chief of naval operations, countered with Inman, the director of Naval Intelligence.

Roeder was all of twenty-five years old, a former freelance journalist who was seen by the rest of Pike's staff as demanding and cantankerous and somewhat overzealous in his attempts at gaining information. Other staffers were apalled when he tried to date a secretary at the National Security Agency, hoping to get her to spill secrets over dinner or coffee-a maneuver that turned out to be a complete failure.

Still, Roeder was able to put a very human face on much of the mystery surrounding the high-tech undersea spy war, and even his critics believed he had come up with a shrewd explanation of how the secrets of decades had survived most of those moments when the United States and the Soviet Union caught one another in action. The way Roeder saw it, the United States and the Soviet Union were behaving much like two men in a smoke-filled room endlessly playing cards. Both of them were cheating, but neither was able to accuse the other because that would end the game.

Now Roeder had to figure out how to break through to a world where the U.S. Navy was protecting not only its own methods but its enemy's as well. What Roeder didn't figure on, however, was Bobby Inman. Inman had already decided to shock Pike and his staff with facts.

Inman was ignoring the pointed suggestions inside the Navy that he should remain silent, certain that wouldn't work. Just a couple of years before, he had served as an executive assistant to Holloway when he was the vice chief of Naval Operations. It was Inman's job to monitor Congress and the press. While there were few challenges to the sanctity of naval secrecy in those days, even the Navy had to suffer through budget hearings. He had watched as budgets were slashed after Hollywood-handsome admirals marched into hearings armed with cadres of assistants but few answers. On the other hand, he had also watched programs survive after being represented by overweight, unkempt, and gruff officers facing Congress sans entourages but with information and courtesy.

Now he approached Roeder and the rest of Pike's staff with little of the expected burnish of his brass. He didn't look or speak like any other admiral. Instead, he was plain, skinny, and decked out in hornrimmed glasses and a uniform with a collar so worn and oversized that the admiral's stars on his shoulders seemed out of place. Pike's staffers saw him as "kind of scary smart." But what surprised them more was that the head of Naval Intelligence seemed willing to cooperate. Inman had decided to head off any criticism or unwanted attention by giving Pike what he wanted, at least some of what he wanted. Inman wanted to hand Pike enough information to swing him around to the Navy's basic point of view: that submarine operations were providing critical information that could be obtained in no other way, and that they were actually saving lots of money by helping the Navy tailor its own construction programs to a well-defined Soviet threat.

With the CNO's blessings, Inman met Roeder with promises to research submarine collisions and groundings. Inman also said that he would look into the cable-tapping. There was a condition, though. Inman wanted guarantees that none of the information would leak. He insisted that the most sensitive documents be held in a safe, a so-called 20-minute safe, one that took that long to burn open with an acetylene torch. Roeder promised to use the safe and promised that only he would have the combination. But when he brought that demand to his bosses on Pike's staff, they told him that no such safe was available. They also quickly determined that Roeder had become a little full of himself. In a grand gesture, perhaps out of honor, perhaps out of selfimportance, Roeder quit over the issue, certain that Inman would know he had walked out in the name of national security.

The gesture did impress the admiral, but not enough for him to give up his effort to win over Pike and crew. Instead, Inman simply turned his brand of open and honest charm on Pike and the rest of his staff. They met several times in the committee's inner sanctum, a windowless room that staffers called the "Cone of Silence" in salute to Get Smart, the popular comedy series about spies. Actually it was more like a horrible little closet, with barely space for chairs around the 18 inch-wide conference table. Within the room hung a seemingly permanent cloud of stale smoke. Inman ignored his dingy surroundings and just talked. There was, he admitted, too little coordination between submarine operations and the more statesmanlike mission of detente. By offering all this without doublespeak and without excuses, he separated himself from the larger intelligence community and endeared himself to Pike's staff.

As time went on, Inman had his aides provide Pike with a detailed study of submarine mishaps. It revealed that there had been at least nine collisions with hostile vessels in the previous ten years and more than 110 possible detections of U.S. surveillance subs. Inman admitted that some sub captains were fudging patrol reports to hide the risks they took and the moments when they were detected. He had even assigned Naval Intelligence officials to look into incidents when either reports made by the spooks on board or intercepted Soviet communications contradicted U.S. sub captains' official reports. Inman also briefed Pike personally about the cable-tapping operation.

In the end, this frank, skinny intellectual with the crooked smile ensured that he wasn't nearly as attractive a target as the likes of Colby and Kissinger. Pike's marauders moved on, spending much of their time looking into the imperious ways in which Kissinger had run the 40 Committee and conducted foreign policy. But when Pike's report was finished in early 1976, the intelligence community and the Ford administration convinced Congress to vote to suppress it. A copy was leaked, though, and the Village Voice printed the lengthy report in its entirety. But, as it turned out, only eight paragraphs were devoted to submarine spying, and not a word was said about the cable taps. Instead, general references were made to the basic submarine surveillance programs now deemed valuable by Pike, and the Navy came in for only a gentle scolding: "The Navy's own justification of the program as a `low risk' venture is inaccurate," Pike's crew wrote. They went on to say that the committee was troubled by risk assessments that were "ritualistic and pro forma" and never varied from "low." It also complained that none of the captains of subs involved in collisions had ever been disciplined.