July 20, 2006, 6:01AM Ship has berth in U.S. history Designed in Houston, boat lifted wreckage of Soviet sub in '70s
By DAVID S. ROSEN Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4059034.html CURTIS Crooke's connection with the Glomar Explorer began back in 1969, when two men from the Central Intelligence Agency showed up at his office uninvited. "They walked in my door and closed it, and my office door was never shut," said Crooke, now 78 and retired in Carmel, Calif. "They wanted to know if my company could build something to lift something so many tons and in about 15 to 20,000 feet of water." Crooke, then the vice president of engineering for Houston-based Global Marine, wasn't told what the CIA wanted to do with this special ship. But he had a hunch. As soon as the two men in suits left his office after making their unusual request, Crooke told his assistant to look up the tonnage of Russian submarines, guessing there was nothing else that heavy the CIA would be so interested in retrieving from the bottom of the ocean. "I don't know what else it could have been," Crooke said, adding that his small company, which designed and built mining and drilling ships, had earlier been involved in a project to retrieve a sunken U.S. submarine off the Azores. "There was no reason for someone coming around and shutting my door when we'd already been discussing something like that. It had to be something that wasn't ours." Crooke's guess proved correct. His company was being recruited to build the Glomar Explorer, a revolutionary ship that successfully lifted wreckage from a sunken Russian submarine from the ocean floor in 1974. It later was turned into a drillship for the oil industry and was used to drill wells that set records for water depth at the time. The ship, now known as the GSF Explorer (for GlobalSantaFe, the company that merged with Global Marine), will be honored today by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as a historic mechanical engineering landmark, a title bestowed to fewer than 250 machines around the world. The honor is given to design marvels that the society sees as high-profile advances in technology, or inventions that affect the quality of life, according to its Web site. The GSF Explorer is still a working vessel, currently drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for BP. It's classified information To this day, some of the details of the Glomar Explorer's mission remain classified, and Crooke the civilian head of the construction maintains there are things he still can't talk about. But the ship itself was so large and strange looking that intelligence officials didn't try to keep its existence a secret. They covered up the vessel's actual mission by saying it was built by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes for mining minerals in the ocean. The CIA contacted Global Marine not long after the Houston company had completed work on the Glomar Challenger, which was capable of drilling for oil at ocean depths of several thousand feet. At that time, few ships could drill in waters more than 1,000 feet. Crooke eventually learned the federal government had its eye on the Russian submarine K-129, which sunk in 1968 within 1,000 miles of Hawaii. The Russians had repeatedly attempted to find it, but according to a 1975 story, the Russians were convinced their ship had sunk nearly 500 miles away from where it actually went down. Location of sub Meanwhile, American computers correctly estimated the location of the K-129, and an underwater robot took pictures confirming its location in water 16,500 feet deep. When it became apparent the Soviets had scaled down their search, the Nixon administration decided to try to retrieve the ship. Once the contract was signed, Crooke knew the exact purpose of the Glomar Explorer. But the hundreds of laborers putting the ship together were never told about recovering a missing submarine. Crooke estimates that fewer than 1,000 people nationwide knew about the ship's mission. Hughes was brought in as a figurehead for the operation, but had little to do with the construction, Crooke said. 'Sugar daddy' "Many other public companies like Lockheed Martin can say they have so many millions of dollars in classified contracts, but poor old Global Marine, a small company, how do we report it?" Crooke said. "We weren't big enough to have that kind of money. We had to have some kind of sugar daddy that had a history with those contracts and was a believable kind of character to be participating in that kind of affair." For the most part, the media bought the cover story, enchanted by Hughes' character and scientific developments. "The CIA stroked news executives and played them against each other, keeping records, including transcripts of telephone conversations, along the way," wrote syndicated media columnist Charles Seib in a story about the cover-up in 1977. At the time the Glomar Explorer was being built, John Lamm, who was working on a construction site in Delaware County, Pa., was taken aback by the look of the ship he first saw in 1972 when it was nearing completion. 'This strange-looking ship' "Up the Delaware River comes this strange-looking ship, and everybody on the job stops," said Lamm, who now lives in Philadelphia. "One of my co-workers says to me, 'That's the Howard Hughes boat,' and that piqued my interest." Lamm, who has retired and written an unpublished book on the Glomar Explorer, is still captivated by the ship. He recently worked to get a Pennsylvania historical marker honoring the vessel, which will soon be installed outside the home of the Independent Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. Reports vary in regard to the success of the mission to retrieve the submarine, code named Project Jennifer. Multiple reports cite intelligence analysts saying the submarine had broken into pieces, either when it sunk or when it was recovered. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment for this story. The Glomar Explorer's mission still inspires speculation. The novel Red Star Rogue, written by Kenneth Sewell and published in 2005, claims the Explorer recovered almost all of the K-129. A newspaper story in 1975 reported that sources said the whole submarine was recovered. Crooke, who was not onboard the Explorer when it lifted the K-129, dismissed speculation that the whole submarine was recovered. He added that people onboard the ship were operating under the assumption the K-129 was laying broken on the seafloor. "You never could lift the whole submarine because it was in pieces," Crooke said. Crooke said after the Glomar Explorer's cover was blown in the media, it didn't make a second trip to the site of the sunken sub. But Crooke declined to say whether parts of the submarine broke off as it was being lifted to the surface. "Now we're getting into things I'd rather not talk about," he said. Part of Navy's reserve fleet After Project Jennifer, the Explorer was transferred from the CIA to the Navy in 1976, according to a letter from naval historian Charles Creekman. The ship was not used for some time and became part of the Navy's reserve fleet, according to Creekman's letter written in 1998 to a former Pennsylvania congressman, Robert Borski, who helped Lamm investigate the Explorer's history. In 1996, the ship was transferred on a 30-year lease back to Global Marine, which later merged to form GlobalSantaFe. Crooke, who retired in 1985, said the vessel underwent modifications so it could drill wells in deep water. The Explorer currently has a crew of about 175, and is working off the Louisiana coast, said Jeff Awalt, who works in investor relations for GlobalSantaFe. Crooke said the ship played a vital role in a number of aspects of modern history ranging from the technology race in the Cold War to how oil is drilled today. "Thinking about it from the Cold War standpoint, we were so far ahead in the West, I don't think they ever knew how much data we got," Crooke said. "Then from the oil industry standpoint, this played a significant long range contribution convincing people in management that you really could start drilling in deep water and handle big items and do precision work on the ocean floor." ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
