The bundle's second number finds the author hired into the largest theft ever proposed by a government in peacetime, over the objection of the instinct he has spent a memoir advertising. The program's director is named below because the government named him first, in its own history; the reader may take the speeches at the author's usual standard, which is the events true and the credit adjusted. —Ed.
For a year and a half nobody said the two words to me again, and I let them lie, the way you let a loaded gun lie on a neighbor's table: it was pointed at nobody I billed. Then in the spring of 1970 the ticket under the wrong name was waiting at the counter again, and this time it said Los Angeles, and the address I had memorized off a telephone call belonged to an office building in El Segundo with a sign in the lobby for a machinery-leasing concern that leased no machinery.1
Guthrie met me at the elevator. We had our ritual by then: the badge, the receipt for the badge, the secrecy acknowledgment offered, declined on religious grounds, and the refusal itself recorded in a memorandum, which he receipted. Then he handed me a card with one word typed on it and asked me to read the word and hand it back.
"Jennifer," I read. "Who is she?"
"A room," Guthrie said. "You are now inside it."
"And the thing the room is around? Does that have a name?"
"Not for you," he said, and took the card back, and receipted the card.2
The floor beyond the cipher lock was engineers, wall to wall, the short-sleeve tie-clip kind, men who could quote you the yield strength of anything on earth except a story. At the end of it, in an office with the blinds dropped against a view of nothing, sat a heavy, deliberate man in black-rimmed glasses, and I give his name because the government has given it since: Parangosky. He had spent his career building airplanes that did not exist for years at a stretch, and he had the manner that trade breeds, the patience of a customs inspector who has all day and owns the border. He did not get up. He looked at me the way you look at a used car a friend has vouched for.
"Mr. Klipspringer. In sixty-eight you told the Navy a certain wreck would keep three years provided nobody did anything." He turned a page in front of him. "We are going to do something."
They gave it to me with easels. A young engineer named Dolan, who had the fervor on him, walked me through the arithmetic of the bottom of the sea: too deep for divers by a factor of fifty, too deep for cables and grapnels, too deep for anything but brute force in industrial quantities. The proposal, said out loud by grown men in daylight, was this: build a ship around a derrick, the way you'd build a building around an elevator; hang a claw under her the size of a small church; lower the claw on a pipe string three miles long, assembled sixty feet at a time, the way oilmen drill, except that no oilman had ever run pipe half so deep with five thousand tons swinging on the end of it; close the claw on a dead submarine; and walk her home up the pipe, sixty feet at a time, into a hold flooded open to the sea, with the doors shutting under her like a jaw. The ship did not exist. The claw did not exist. The pipe did not exist, nor the steel it wanted, nor the winches, nor the men trained to any of it.
"And the cost of all this nonexistence," I said.
"Two hundred million," Dolan said, in the voice you would use for "two hundred."3
I asked him how many men would crew her. About one hundred and eighty, he said, mission and marine crew together. And how many of the hundred and eighty would know what she was? All of them, he said, surprised at the question; you cannot run a moon pool on a need-to-know basis. And I sat with that number while the easel changed, one hundred and eighty men, cleared, briefed, volunteered, and every last one of them equipped from the factory with a wife, a bar, and a memoir.
I have stood next to large numbers all my life, the way other men stand next to horses, and I am not spooked by zeros. What lifted the hair on my arms was not the money. It was the calendar. I stepped into the corridor for a paper cup of water and did my own arithmetic against the cooler: four years of construction, maybe six; a shipyard in the public view; four thousand union men with lunch pails and brothers-in-law; a launch with champagne and newspapers, because you cannot launch six hundred feet of ship privately; then sea trials, then a voyage, then, God willing, the most interesting cargo on the planet, sitting in a hold in some harbor while two governments decided what to pretend. My nose, which has smelled catastrophe two days early all my life and never once been wrong going off, went off in that corridor like a fire bell. This dies of daylight, it said. Not this year, not next year, but before the end, as certainly as pipe is long.
And I want the next entry in the ledger set down plainly, because it is the hinge of this bundle and there is no flattering way to write it. Every other time in my life the bell rang, I left. Ask the men of the Hill, ask two or three boards of directors, ask, if you can reach him, the President's re-election committee. This time I heard the bell, and I finished my water, and I went back in and asked where I would be sitting.
I was forty-seven years old and rich enough to refuse anybody, and I stayed for two reasons, which I have had thirty years to sort and here they are. The retainer was the smaller one, though I twice drafted a letter of resignation that spring, and each draft died on the desk of a raise I had not asked for; Guthrie would appear with a revised consultancy memorandum, and receipt my refusal to sign it, and the number inside would have grown a digit, and I would stay another quarter. The larger reason is worse. Inside that cipher lock, men who had built the fastest and highest and blackest machinery in the history of the world were proposing to pick a fleet ballistic-missile submarine off the floor of the deepest ocean like a fork off a restaurant floor, without the waiter noticing, and they wanted me in the room while they did it. Vanity, in other words. The apparatus of the century was extending me a chair again, and I have never in my life declined the chair. That is the whole confession, and the rest of this bundle is the invoice.
Parangosky ran the room the way McKibbin had run her courtyard, without visible effort and without appeal. I watched him kill a briefing once, eleven slides in, by taking off his glasses; the colonel presenting simply stopped, gathered his easel, and thanked him. To me he talked more than he talked to the engineers, because I was the only man on the floor in his own line of work, which was not salvage. It was belief.
"I hid airplanes for a living, Mr. Klipspringer," he said, feet up, blinds down, the one time he ever said more than a paragraph in my hearing. "An airplane is easy. A rumor with wings. You build it behind a fence in a desert, you fly it at night, and the men who rivet it go home to wives who think they make washing machines. Nobody's brother-in-law ever photographed a U-2, because there was nothing to photograph and no place to stand. This thing is the opposite problem entire. She will be built in a public yard in Pennsylvania by four thousand men, in the open, over three years, photographed every day from a highway bridge, and launched in front of bunting and a band. You cannot hide her, so I will not try. What I require is that she be explained. I want a reason for her so public, so boring, and so financially convincing that a man who checks it twice feels like a fool for checking once. Secrecy is a fence, and fences draw boys. A good story is a pasture, and nobody counts the cows in a pasture. And understand the specification, because everyone but you will get it backward: the story must survive success. Any story survives failure; failure buries its own. If this works, that ship will be the most interesting object on earth for the rest of the century, and the story has to hold while she is interesting. Build me that pasture."
I have heard the trade talked by presidents of two kinds and directors of three agencies, and I never heard it talked better, and I record for the benefit of nobody that my first thought was: this man could have run me.4
So through the summer of 1970 we sat, five or six of us, in the room with the dead blinds, auditioning owners for a ship that did not exist. It wanted a private party; the government owning it killed the story in the crib. It wanted an industry with a reason to touch the deep ocean floor, and there was exactly one on offer, because the oceanographers had spent a decade telling the Sunday supplements that the Pacific floor was paved with potato-sized lumps of nickel and copper and manganese, trillions of tons of them, free for the scooping.5 Mining, then; a mining ship; that part was arithmetic and I claim no share of it. The problem was the miner. An oil major had the money and the plausibility, and a board of forty, and a board of forty is a newspaper with dividends. A consortium of majors was worse, forty boards. A university could be rented, but professors sign their names to things. A dummy corporation, freshly invented, was worst of all: a dummy is a widow with no photographs on the mantel, and the neighbors invent worse than the truth. We needed a name the public already believed in, attached to a man the public could believe anything of, and the list of American billionaires who signed nothing, explained nothing, showed their face nowhere, and were already famous for doing with their money exactly as they pleased was a list of one.
Somebody in that room said it first. I have told the story at a hundred dinners, and in the dinner version the room goes quiet and the quiet is mine. Guthrie's minutes, which exist, record only that the name arose and was assigned for study, and the reader has learned by now what my testimony weighs against a minute. But it is my memoir, and the alteration of names has been my one continuous art, so let it stand the way I have always told it: that Parangosky said the owner would have to be rich past questioning, mad in a documented direction, and constitutionally incapable of explanation, and that I set down my coffee and gave them the name — or I have said for thirty years that I did, and every man who could correct me is dead — "Hughes."
The chronology compresses honestly. The feasibility studies ran from 1969; the commitment to construction came in 1970; the approvals ran through the interagency body known as the 40 Committee and required, at intervals, the signature of the President. The office building, the lobby sign, and the cipher-locked floor are all in the declassified history, which the reader is reminded was written by the Agency for itself, with no expectation of company. —Ed.
The security officer's distinction was exact, and thirty-five years of journalism got it wrong: JENNIFER was the name of the security compartment, the fence and not the field. The project's own cryptonym, withheld from the author in the scene he describes, was AZORIAN, which is the word on this bundle's wrapper. How the author came to possess it the Editor cannot say. —Ed.
The figure grew as such figures do. The commonly cited final cost is on the order of $350 million in 1974 dollars; estimates in the serious literature run past $500 million. The Editor gives the spread rather than an answer, that being all the record itself does. —Ed.
John Parangosky, a career officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, had directed the development programs of the U-2 and the A-12 before AZORIAN, and is named and praised in the Agency's declassified history and its accompanying commentary; he died in 2004. Colleagues' recollections agree on the glasses, the patience, and the terminated briefings. No recollection of his places the author in the building. —Ed.
The supplements had it from the scientists, and the scientists had it from the sea: the polymetallic nodule is real, and the tonnages are real. What the Sunday arithmetic omitted was the cost of fetching a potato from three miles down, a subtraction that will bear on the fourth number of this bundle. The memorandum recommending Mr. Hughes as cover, it should be said here, survives in the program file: two pages, dated six days before the meeting the author describes, over the initials of an officer of the cover staff. Names arise twice, and dinner stories are not evidence against documents, nor documents against dinner stories; the Editor sets them side by side and moves on. —Ed.