Blind Man's Bluff by Christopher Drew

Author:Christopher Drew [Sontag, Sherry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Naval Warfare
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

(9)

THE $500 MILLION SAND CASTLE

It was October 22, 1973, and journalist Seymour M. Hersh was taking notes in a reporter’s staccato, partial sentences—partial secrets that he ingested along with dinner as he sat in a suburban restaurant with a source whose name he was bound by ethics and bargain never to reveal.

At the moment, anyone would have expected this thirty-six-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner to have been entirely embroiled in Watergate. He was, after all, the top investigative reporter for the New York Times, albeit one who was rumpled and stubborn and given to bursts of profanity. And he was running a frustrated second to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post in the race to uncover the story that would make legends of these unknown, scruffy reporters and felons of their more polished and powerful targets.

Watergate scoops, however, were not what Hersh had come to this dinner for, and the man he was dining with did not belong to the group that soon would be branded “All the President’s Men.” This man ran in different company, in the company of spies, perhaps in “The Company,” as the CIA was known. He had only recently stepped down from his post as a high-ranking national security official. He was, as Hersh put it, “somebody who sat at the cat-bird’s seat for a long time,” somebody who “knew everything.”

More than that, Hersh would forever refuse to reveal. Indeed, he was taking considerable trouble to meet this man in secret, slipping out of the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Times to catch up with him in another city.

Hersh was making this trip because there was a story he wanted almost as much as the epic of a collapsing presidency. He had been getting tips for years about costly wastes and excessive dangers in U.S. intelligence operations, including some of the Navy’s most secret submarine spy missions. Now he wanted to shine a light on this pitch-black world that had always been left to operate under a peculiar type of political immunity that could only be imparted by the words “top-secret” and “highly classified.”

These phrases had once been read by journalists and lawmakers as signals to back off and stop asking questions. But these days, the Watergate saga was emboldening the press and Congress, encouraging them to be more skeptical, and Hersh was at the forefront of a drive to hold the intelligence community accountable for what it had been doing behind the veil.

Much of what he had been hearing dealt with cost overruns on spy satellites and the risks being taken in undersea spy programs. He also had learned about the Holystone surveillance submarines that were darting into Soviet waters. And just recently, Hersh had started picking up scattered rumors about a CIA operation designed to steal something that the Soviets had lost or discarded at the bottom of an ocean. Three times he had been told that the agency was constructing an enormous barge that could reach down through miles of raging currents, crushing pressures, and unending darkness.

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