I’m sure Peter puzzled over his meal
choices. What to serve when the story at hand is about
submarines and deep-sea mining vessels? A
natural choice would have been a tasty deep water fish. But lanternfish are hard to come by, even
here on the west coast. So Peter pivoted to patriotism and last Thursday
showed his adopted flag by treating us to an all-American classic, the
hamburger. Combined with steak fries and salad, and ice cream
afterwards, our meal was the perfect accompaniment to a quintessentially
American story about ingenuity, money, and an engineering challenge fueled by
the anxiety of the Cold War.
Our
Review and Discussion of The Taking of K-129 by Josh Dean
In 1968,
the Soviet ballistic submarine K-129 went
missing. Unbeknownst to the Kremlin, it suffered
a catastrophic event and sank along the International Date Line north of
Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, the Americans learned of
the loss and, using submerged acoustical beacons, discovered the sub’s
location. With the CIA overseeing the mission, the race was on to devise a means
of raising the sub before the Soviets realized it had been located.
The focus
of Dean’s story is the engineering challenge posed by retrieving a 1,500-ton
sub from a depth of 16,700 feet. Complicating
the mission was the requirement that the nature of the work be kept secret. This required the construction of the Glomar
Explorer, the world’s largest deep sea mining ship, equipped with a submersible
barge (to carry the sub back). It also
required the secret cooperation of the Howard Hughes Corporation, which provided
the CIA with its cover story: the Glomar
Explorer would explore the seabed for manganese nodules!
Project
Azorian was a partial success. Only a portion of the sub was retrieved, as the
remainder broke apart during the lift process.
The story helped us understand America’s mood in the late 1960’s: its confidence was high but Sputnik and
Vietnam had punctured its post-war belief that anything was
possible. Much like the Apollo mission,
Project Azorian tested and confirmed America’s engineering prowess.
After
expressing our appreciation for a story so little known, we took turns faulting
Dean for inserting one unnecessary character after another. The Glomar Explorer had 178 sailors and
engineers, and it felt like we were introduced to each one. The narrative was also far too long. What should have been long-form journalism,
according to Larry, was instead expanded into a full-length book. Both Jack and Roy skipped entire chapters and
still came away with the story intact. John
was pleased to learn more about the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and I was tickled
to learn the origin of the CIA’s “neither confirm nor deny” response to press
inquiries. But neither was necessary to
Dean’s story.
Our
Rating of The Taking of K-129
Our below-average
5.7 rating reflected our impatience with Dean but belied our enthusiasm for the
subject matter. Indeed, some of us had a
personal connection to the story. George
worked for the Hughes Corporation in the 1970’s and got to tour the secret
offices used by the CIA. Mando and others
recall boating around the Glomar Explorer after it was mothballed in Suisun
Bay. And Larry’s uncle worked on
submarines at Mare Island and took several out on shakedown cruises.
Next
Up: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Roy proposed three novels for next month, each reflecting the theme of
love and war. We turned down Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Cleave’s
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven and
instead opted for Australia’s most recent winner of the Man Booker Prize, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. We’ll learn in December if Flanagan’s story
of POWs on the Burmese Railway justifies all the attention it’s received.
