The memoir proper filled nine string-tied bundles; the parcel marked "R. — later" is not a bundle of the memoir; this is a tenth bundle of the memoir, tied separately, found apart from the stack, wrapped in a folded chart of the North Pacific, and labeled in the author's hand with the single word AZORIAN. That word did not exist in public until February 2010, when the Central Intelligence Agency declassified its history of an operation the press had called, for thirty-five years and wrongly, "Project Jennifer"; the hand that wrote the label stopped in 2001, and the Editor states the fact and draws no conclusion. Of the Editor's own correspondence with the Agency in this matter, more at the bundle's end. —Ed.
I was forty-five in the autumn of 1968, and carried, as I had been carried in 1952 and again in 1966, on a certain payroll as a public-information consultant.1 The trade had not changed, and neither had the rule beneath it: when a government frightens itself it sends for a man who keeps no records, and I had kept none since Los Alamos. What had changed was the fee, which I had been raising steadily for sixteen years against the day Washington frightened itself over something worth the freight.
The telephone went at Woodside on the tenth of September, a Tuesday, during dinner. A voice I did not know asked whether I could be in Washington on Thursday, declined to say why on an open line, which told me the first half, and rang off; the ticket waiting at the San Francisco counter next morning, under a name not mine, told me the second. Bunny asked who had called. I said business, and she went back to the gravy, having been hearing business from me since 1945.
They gave me the rest on the Thursday, in a borrowed office across the river from Washington, a room with a dead plant and a Navy calendar still turned to August. At the door stood a wide, mild man of about forty in a suit the color of wet cardboard, who signed me into a log, issued me a visitor's badge, and took a receipt for the badge. He then produced a secrecy acknowledgment for my signature, and when I declined, on religious grounds, he wrote out a memorandum recording the refusal and receipted the memorandum. I will call him Guthrie, which is not his name; he would want the alteration noted, dated, and initialed. Guthrie was security for everything that follows, and since he stays to the end of this bundle the reader had better have him now: a believer in paper as complete as I am an infidel, a man who confirmed his telephone calls by letter and, I am confident, his prayers by carbon.
Before the others came in he opened a folder and read me to myself, flatly, like a man checking a crate against a waybill: Pasadena, the Hill, the July of 1952, Spain in '66. "Positive results," he said at Spain, and closed it. I sat smiling my useful smile while my stomach considered the matter, because I had spent a quarter of a century arranging to be unwritten, and here was a folder. The man who kept no records had a record, it turned out, kept by somebody else, and if I had understood what that one sentence was going to cost me by the end of these pages, I might have gone home. I did not go home. The reader knows by now that I never once went home.
The others were two: a Navy captain wearing submariner's dolphins and the complexion of a man who sleeps under fluorescent light, and a civilian whose agency nobody named, which in that town is a name. The captain did the talking.
"In February a Soviet missile submarine sailed from Kamchatka on patrol," he said. "In March she missed her radio schedule. She has missed every schedule since."
"Sunk," I said.
"Lost with all hands."2
"Where?"
The civilian answered a different question, which is how you know you are near the middle of a thing. "The Soviets don't know. They searched from March into May. Dozens of ships, aircraft, trawlers, a grid you could see from an airliner window. Then they went home with nothing."
"And you know."
"We know within a circle you could row across in a morning," the captain said. "The ocean is instrumented, Mr. Klipspringer. She made a sound on the eighth of March. Sound arrives at different stations at different times, and the differences are a position."3
"And aboard her," the civilian said, before I could ask why a wreck rated a consultant, "are three ballistic missiles with hydrogen warheads, torpedoes to match, her code room, her cipher machines, and several months of the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mail. Under three miles of water. Which her owners cannot find, and we can."
I asked the question I am paid for, which is never the interesting one. "What do you want from me?"
"An estimate. Whether it keeps, and for how long."
"Keeps is two questions," I said. "That the boat is lost, her owners know already; you can't unlose her. That she is found is the property of this room and its cousins. Which silence do you want estimated?"
"Both," the captain said. "They travel together."
"And you have professionals for this. Whole floors of them."
"Our professionals live inside the fence," the civilian said. "They can tell us what a safe holds. You have spent twenty years outside the fence, telling frightened committees what the street will do, and the street has never once caught you at it. That is the reference."
So I did the work, and my work has always looked like gossip. Two days of it: how many men held the position (under two hundred, caged into compartments that did not know each other's names); how much was written down (too much, there is always too much, but all of it behind combination locks, with custodians like Guthrie taking receipts off one another in a daisy chain); which offices had acquired a mood since March; and whether anyone, anywhere in the chain, was crying. That last is not cruelty; secrets do not leak out of safes, they leak out of faces, and a man mourning a classmate will say at the graveside what no committee could subpoena out of him.
There the calendar was working for me. In May the Navy had lost a submarine of its own, Scorpion, ninety-nine men, somewhere southwest of the Azores, and had spent the whole summer dragging the Atlantic for her in public grief.4 Every long face in every Navy town in America already had a home-team explanation, and nobody interrogates mourning; it is the best cover there is, being the one story decent people refuse to check. I said as much out loud, in a room containing men with classmates on the bottom of two oceans, in words I had the sense to pad, and they nodded slowly and despised me without heat, and I billed the day.
My finding went in the way all my findings went in, out loud, nothing signed: it keeps. A government that cannot find its own dead will announce nothing; a government that can find them but shouldn't be able to will announce less; and the sea at sixteen thousand feet keeps its own counsel better than either. Three years, I said, possibly five, provided nobody printed anything and nobody did anything. I certified that silence exactly the way I had certified Spanish seawater two years before, from a dry place, briefly, for money. The difference, which I did not bill anybody for, was that the water at Palomares had actually been safe.
I flew home and attended to the other business of that autumn, and I set it down here because a confession that picks its sins is an advertisement. My son Halsted was twenty-one, in his last year at Stanford, and his student deferment was due to graduate when he did. The war that year was taking the gas-pumpers' sons and the Mexicans', which I had noticed, and which changed nothing in what follows. At the club one Saturday I stood a certain doctor two whiskies and admired photographs of his ketch, and asked for nothing, and wrote nothing, and in November the draft physical discovered in my son's back something that would keep him from carrying a rifle but not, I am glad to report, a tennis racket. Hal believes to this day it was his back. It was a ketch. Nothing was signed and nothing was paid, and Bunny sent the doctor's wife a Christmas card of her own accord, which in our house constitutes the entire subject, raised and closed.
In December the same voice put me on another airplane, west this time, to Pearl Harbor, where the Pacific Fleet keeps its photographs. In a windowless room smelling of developer and cold coffee, a lieutenant commander dealt prints onto a light table like a bridge hand he was proud of, and Guthrie, who had flown out ahead of me with a courier bag chained to his wrist, receipted each print off a list as it touched the glass.
Through the autumn, it emerged, an American submarine had hung over the wreck with a camera on a towed sled, miles of cable out, taking pictures by strobe light in water that has been dark since the world was made. Twenty thousand frames.5 The lieutenant commander named what we were seeing in the flat voice men use to hold a thing at instrument range. Here was the sail, lying over. Here the hull abaft it, opened up the way a tin opens, from inside. Here the missile deck, one hatch sprung, and a snarl of line across it that had been tidy once.
And in the corner of one frame there was a sailor. I will not describe him past saying that three miles of water is gentler than whatever happened above it, that he was young, and that the room went very quiet while that print lay on the glass. I studied my coffee spoon, which said U.S. NAVY on the handle, until the print moved along, and my stomach held its seat, barely. I mention the stomach because the reader will need to know, later in this bundle, that it can lose it.
They asked their question again with the pictures on the glass, and I gave them three years firm and my reasons with it. The Soviets believed the Pacific was big. The photographs said the Pacific had witnesses, but photographs three miles down have no negatives loose in the world; everything lived inside the fence. As long as nobody moved, nothing moved. A wreck at that depth, I told them, is the best-kept secret on earth; it keeps itself; leave her alone and she will outlast every man cleared to know her name.
The fee was banked by Christmas, through the arrangement the reader knows, and with the money in, my curiosity came out of hiding. At the light table, while the lieutenant commander boxed his prints, I asked Guthrie the question I had been too well paid to ask in September. What did they intend to do with her? She lay sixteen thousand five hundred feet down, deeper than any object her size had ever been brought back from, deeper than sunlight, deeper than argument. What was there to do with a thing like that but keep her?
Guthrie gathered his receipts the way a teller gathers other people's money, evened the edges, and looked at me with the mild eyes of the entirely literal.
"Lift it," he said.
As with the leaves concerning 1952 and 1966, the arrangement is beyond documentary reach: no roster, voucher, or consultancy list of the period carries the author's name or his trade. The security annex to the program's declassified history counts every category of person admitted to the compartment; "consultants" appears among the categories; it is the only one whose count is redacted. —Ed.
She was K-129, a Golf II-class diesel-electric ballistic-missile submarine out of Rybachiy, Kamchatka, sailed 24 February 1968 and lost on or about 8 March, some 1,560 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii, in water close to 16,500 feet deep. The cause has never been settled: a battery-gas explosion while snorkeling, a missile-propellant accident, and, on the Soviet side, a lasting suspicion of collision with USS Swordfish, which the United States Navy denies and the photography of the wreck does not support. The dispute is printed here as the author's contemporaries held it, unresolved. —Ed.
The captain's arithmetic was the Air Force Technical Applications Center's, whose acoustic arrays, kept for listening to other men's atom bombs, had recorded an event in the North Pacific on 8 March 1968; the triangulation gave the search its circle. The Soviet effort of March–May 1968 is documented, as is its failure; they did not know where she went down, and went home. —Ed.
USS Scorpion was lost on 22 May 1968 with ninety-nine men, returning from the Mediterranean, and was still missing when the author was summoned east; her wreck was located near the Azores at the end of October. The year in which each navy lost a submarine is as he gives it, and so, the service records suggest, was the grief he proposed to make use of. —Ed.
The photography was USS Halibut's, which found the wreck on 20 August 1968 and worked over it for some three weeks with a towed camera sled, returning better than twenty thousand frames. No log confirms the author's viewing at Pearl Harbor in December; the Editor notes only that the lieutenant commander's bridge-hand manner, and the spoon, are not the kind of detail his invention usually troubles over. —Ed.