The bundle closes where the operation closed: on a sentence. What the author claims concerning its composition, and what the record answers, are set side by side below, and the Editor, closing the bundle, adds one document of his own. —Ed.
The Agency's letter had asked for my views on a consulting basis, and my views arrived, as my views have always arrived, in person and unaccompanied by paper. In the first week of the summer of 1975 I sat in a borrowed conference room on the wrong floor of a building I won't name, with a government carafe, government coffee, and three lawyers, and I want this scene set down slowly, because out of that hour came the only thing I ever made.
The senior lawyer stated the trap, and I will say for the profession that when they finally meet a problem worthy of them, they state it beautifully. A journalist had asked, under the statute, for the records of the Agency's dealings with the press about the operation. "If we reply that no such records exist," he said, "we have lied, and the lie is discoverable, and men go to prison. If we reply that records exist and are withheld, we have confirmed to the Soviet Union, by return post, everything the operation ever was, because the withholding names the subject. If we do not reply at all, we default, and default is confession with court costs. The statute assumes that between yes and no there is nothing. Mr. Klipspringer, we are open to hearing that the statute is wrong."
I asked for the request itself and read it twice, and I remember the sensation exactly, and it was recognition. I had spent fifty years being asked, by wives, by committees, by security officers with folders, questions to which yes convicted me and no convicted me worse, and I had lived by the discovery that you are never obliged to answer the question; you may, instead, answer the asking. It had carried me out of Pasadena and through the Hill and past the loyalty boards and around Palomares, the whole apparatus of my worthless, prosperous life, and here at the end of it sat the government of the United States, in a room with bad coffee, needing to be taught my religion in one sitting.
"You are being asked whether a fact exists," I said. "Decline the premise. Reply about the reply. Say: we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested. Confirming and denying are the only two services a fact can compel from you; refuse both, in one sentence, as standing policy, uniformly, forever, and the fact goes back under three miles of water. But the sentence must be exact. Not 'we will not say,' which is contempt. Not 'we cannot say,' which is pleading. Neither confirm nor deny: the two failures named, both declined, nothing else present in the sentence for a court to bite."
The senior lawyer began trying it against his troubles the way you try a key in doors. And when she appeals, he said. The same sentence, I said. And when the next journalist asks about a different operation altogether, one that never existed? The same sentence, and that is the whole beauty: said once it is an evasion, said always it is a policy, and a policy is a garment the courts will let the executive wear without asking what is underneath. And Congress? Congress, I said, you confirm to in a locked room with the doors logged; Congress is not the public, Congress is a rival owner.
The man from Justice said it was not an answer. I said it was the whole answer, that its entire legal content was the absence of any, and that this was not a defect being disguised but the design being stated. The young associate counsel at the end of the table, who had said nothing all hour, read it back off his pad, once, slowly, the way you count strange money, and the senior lawyer looked at the ceiling with his fingertips together, and I watched the sentence do to those three men what the name Klipspringer had done to a schoolmaster in Astoria in 1932, and then I took more of the terrible coffee, and that is where it was composed, between the coffee and the carafe, by me, out loud, unsigned.1 I have claimed a great many things in these pages on no evidence but my word, and the reader has been decent about it. This claim I make differently, with my whole chest, at the end of everything: the sentence is mine. I was in the room. It was June. The carafe was Revere ware and the coffee was punishment, and the sentence is mine.
What happened after happened fast, and I give it as a ledger, which is what it was. The second voyage died in June, in a committee, of exposure: with the story loose, the Soviets had simply parked on the site, a tug here, a trawler there, rotating like heirs sitting up with a will, and no administration was going to send the most famous secret ship on earth back out to be rammed on television.2 The rebuilt claw was half-erected in the barge at Redwood City when the money stopped. The mania went the same season; the cover had been the industry's load-bearing rumor, and when the cover stood revealed as government theater, the prospectuses found their honest level, which was their weight in paper. Ostrander published his napkin arithmetic in a journal the following year, unimproved and unanswerable, and was cited ever after by the same men who had voted for the teeth; I sent him no note, there being nothing a man in my position could decently have congratulated him on. I had been out since Christmas, my nose having said in October what the committee said in June, and I will spare the reader the figure and keep the character: I entered the ocean-mining business a rich man and left it a noticeably richer one, having dealt the entire time in the one commodity I have never once been short, other men's belief.3 The trustee of a certain foundation stopped lunching with me that year, without ever learning enough to know why he wanted to; I let him have the distance; it was the cheapest thing I gave anybody in the whole affair.
The journalist, meanwhile, sued, as the able ones do, and the sentence went into court wearing the government's collar, and in 1976 the appeals court in the District of Columbia looked at my twelve words and found them good. And then the thing happened that no man in the lying trades has ever had happen, and I ask the reader to sit with it: the sentence took the ship's name, because the request had named the ship, and it became the Glomar response, and then a noun, and then a verb. Agencies Glomar. Filers of requests are Glomared. It is taught, cited, indexed; it has outlived the operation, the Director, the journalist's magazine, and the century; it is, so far as I can determine, the single piece of American prose composed since the war that the government has never once stopped using. My father left a piano and a debt in a dead man's house. I have left a sentence in the mouth of the Republic, and the Republic says it every day, to its own citizens, in its own courts, and means it.
Hughes died the following April, in an airplane somewhere over Texas, weighing less than a boy, never having seen the ship that carries his name into every law library on earth; the name did all the work to the last, and past it. The ship herself they mothballed, and then, because history is a finer ironist than any of us on her staff, leased out in 1978 to a genuine consortium that went prospecting for genuine nodules with her, my lie having come true at last, three years too late to be of use to a living soul; the consortium included, and I want this savored, the very company that had built the claw in secret at Redwood City, which thereby became the only party in the century to go ocean mining twice, once pretending and once believing; and as I write this in the year 2000 she is at sea somewhere drilling for oil under an honest contract, the only party to the whole affair, myself included, ever to find respectable work.
So close the bundle's accounts, and I will rule the lines myself, the Editor having had nine numbers of practice at ruling them for me. The government got thirty-eight feet of the wrong end of a submarine, two torpedoes, and a funeral. The Soviets got proof, eventually, of what their fleet was worth to us, which I am told did wonders for their budget conferences. The Hughes empire got a burglary it never solved and a name it never controlled. The believers got the Law of the Sea, which is the mania continued by other means, and the lawyers got a doctrine. And I got the fee, and the fee after that, and in the fullness of time the doctorates and the medal and the boy from CNBC, and I am aware, tallying it at seventy-seven, that every other party to the transaction can at least point to what it lost, whereas I can point to nothing whatever, my name being on no manifest, no minute, no filing, no file anywhere in the wreckage, exactly as my religion commands and my heart, that certified organ, has never quite forgiven.4
Because here is the joke at the bottom of the bundle, and I will make it myself rather than leave it lying about for scholars. I wanted one thing across this whole century, and the reader has known it since Great Neck: to make the borrowed name real, to be the somebody the name kept promising. And in June of 1975, between the coffee and the carafe, I finally made the one immortal thing I was ever going to make, and it was a sentence whose entire genius is that it claims nothing, admits nothing, signs nothing, and belongs to nobody; I built my monument out of my own disease, and the monument stands, and by its own terms it can never be mine. Fifty-eight years I certified silences for other men, and the last silence certified was my own.
So I will break it here, on the last page, in the only court left open to me, which is you. The sentence is mine. I said it first, in a borrowed room, to three lawyers and a carafe, and no record on this earth will bear me out, because I built the record that way, and I would build it that way again. Confirm it or deny it — either would be more than I ever gave any man who asked me anything — but let somebody, at last, do one or the other.5
The request was Harriett Ann Phillippi's, for Rolling Stone, in 1975, seeking the Agency's records of its efforts against the press coverage; the reply she received reads: "we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested." The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sustained the form in Phillippi v. CIA, 546 F.2d 1009 (D.C. Cir. 1976), and "Glomar response" entered the law and, in time, the language. The drafting is credited in the later journalism to an associate general counsel of the Agency who is known in that record under a borrowed name, "Walt Logan." The Editor prints the pseudonym beside the author's claim and observes only that whoever composed the sentence declined, like its subject, and like the author, to attach his name to it. —Ed.
The second-voyage project, MATADOR, was cancelled in June 1975, the exposure having ended any possibility of returning to the site, over which Soviet vessels thereafter kept periodic watch. The wreck of K-129, less thirty-eight feet, remains where it has been since March 1968. —Ed.
The author's accounts, examined in the estate proceedings, held ocean-minerals positions acquired from 1972 and disposed of between October and December 1974, at prices the reader may imagine. The Halsted trust, his wife's, held not one share of any ocean-mining issue at any time between 1970 and 1975. No evidence survives that anyone told her anything. The reader has met this pattern before, over the roast, in the fourth number, and will meet it again. —Ed.
One file, it turns out, does carry him. Among the papers produced in the Hughes estate litigation are fourteen contact memoranda from the Romaine Street communications office, the first dated in the week the author gives for the dinner at Musso's in 1970, the last in March 1975, each over the same set of initials, and each beginning with the words "Subject again attempted." The custodian the author calls Fay Brill reported him from the first evening to the last, in good order, on time, in triplicate. The man who kept no records was, throughout the operation, a record: kept by somebody else, and kept well. —Ed.
The Agency's history of Project AZORIAN was declassified, in redacted form, in February 2010, the year the storage unit yielding this manuscript was opened; the two documents waited out the century in storage together, and neither willingly. In the ordinary course of annotating these papers, the Editor filed requests in 2010 concerning the author's relationship, if any, with the Central Intelligence Agency. The reply, when it came, was one sentence long. The reader already knows the sentence. The author asked, on his last page, that somebody confirm or deny him; the government of the United States, given the opportunity, in writing, declined to do either, which is the only epitaph he ever earned, and, the Editor has come to believe, the one he was asking for. —Ed.