Ambassador Duke stood on a rocky beach, dressed in nothing but swim trunks, loafers, a blue bathrobe, and a bathing cap. The morning air felt sharp and chilly; the blue waves, slithering on the shoreline, looked cold and forbidding. Behind the ambassador, up a slight incline, squatted a white modern building — a new parador, or government-run hotel — that seemed utterly out of place in the barren desert. The dapper ambassador, too, seemed out of place, half naked and shivering on this godforsaken strip of sand. But Duke was a man of duty, and he had a job to do. He slipped off his loafers and sank his toes into the cold, damp sand. He untied his bathrobe and tossed it aside on the beach. Then, as a swarm of news reporters watched, their cameras clicking, Duke shouted, “Okay, let’s go!” With his children following gleefully behind, he ran down the beach and splashed into the 54 degree water.
A few minutes later, Duke emerged looking winded. The water was “thrilling,” he told the gathered reporters. “Sensational!” As the ambassador dressed quickly, the questions peppered him: “Did you detect any radioactivity in the water?” asked one reporter. “If this is radioactivity,” said the ebullient Duke, “I love it!” Another reporter questioned the ambassador: “When you were out there, did you happen to see the bomb?” Duke replied gamely, “I wish I had!” On March 2, less than a week before the ambassador’s swim, the U.S. government had finally admitted that it had lost an H-bomb in Spain. For weeks, the U.S. and Spanish governments, aware that the current press policy was neither controlling information nor calming fears, had been debating how to release more information. Duke had been pushing for a more liberal press policy since early February but could not get the two governments to agree on the particulars. The stalemate finally broke when Dr. Otero Navascuéz, president of Spain’s Junta de Energía Nuclear, discussed the subject with the Spanish news agency CIFRA, which published lengthy articles on March 1. The Americans didn’t know if Navascuéz had acted independently or in concert with the Spanish government, and the leak annoyed them. But it was also a relief. The Department of Defense used the opportunity to publish a formal press release. It read: Search is being pressed off the Spanish Coast for the recovery of material carried by the two planes involved in the recent air collision, and for fragments of wreckage which might furnish clues to the cause of the accident. Included aboard the B-52 which collided with the KC-135 tanker were several unarmed nuclear weapons, one of which has not yet been recovered.
When this search and investigation have been concluded further announcement will be made of the results.
The impact of the weapons on land resulted in a scattering of some plutonium (PU 239) and uranium (U 235) in the immediate vicinity of the point of impact. There was no nuclear explosion.
Built-in safeguards perfected through years of extensive safety testing, have allowed the US to handle, store and transport nuclear weapons for more than two decades without a nuclear detonation.
Thorough safety rules and practices also have been developed for dealing with any weapon accident which might result in the spilling of nuclear materials.
Radiological surveys of the Palomares area and its human and animal populations have included detailed laboratory studies by leading Spanish and U.S. scientists throughout the 44 days since the accident. They have obtained no evidence of a health hazard. These experts say there is no hazard from eating vegetables marketed from this area, from eating the meat or fish or drinking the milk of animals.
Steps have been taken to insure that the affected areas are thoroughly cleaned up, and some soil and vegetation are being removed.
These measures are part of a comprehensive program to eliminate the chance of hazard, to set at rest unfounded fears, and thus to restore normal life and livelihood to the people of Palomares.
Immediately, various government agencies began stumbling over one another, releasing press statements, talking points, and question-and-answer sheets in both Washington and Madrid. The Department of Defense, trying to control the situation, quickly ordered the embassy to coordinate all publicity but permitted General Wilson and Admiral Guest to handle routine public affairs matters on their own.
The press reacted to the sudden surge of information with a mixture of bemusement and sarcasm.
Despite the official stonewalling, reporters had known the main points for weeks. “The news is now official. One of our H-bombs is missing,” said an editorial in The Boston Globe, which then compared the searchers to basketball players looking for a lost contact lens. “One U.S. official insisted that the bomb was not actually lost,” added Newsweek. “‘We just haven’t found it,’ he explained.” The Washington Post and The New York Times ran a cartoon of a befuddled military man tipping his hat to two Spanish peasants. “Perdoneme,” he asks, “ha visto un — uh — H-bomb?” Duke was pleased with the new policy. But now that the radioactive contamination was public knowledge, he worried that Soviet propaganda could hurt Spain’s largest industry: tourism. Together, Ambassador Duke and Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Spanish minister of information and tourism, cooked up a publicity stunt to defuse any fears. Fraga was planning a trip to Almería to dedicate the new parador; Duke and his family would join him at the hotel and then swim in the Mediterranean to prove it wasn’t radioactive. “If I could take my children there swimming, and go in myself, why, obviously it could not be all that dangerous,” said Duke. The CBS reporter Bernard Kalb called the swim a Spanish-American effort at “aquatic diplomacy.” “There are lots of things, like money,” he said, “riding on this dip in the Med.”
Something went awry on the morning of the swim, however, and Fraga never showed up. Duke made his chilly dip without the Spanish minister, chatted with newsmen, and posed for photos on the deck of the new parador. Then he changed clothes, threw his bathing suit into the trunk of a car, and headed a few miles down the road to Camp Wilson for a scheduled briefing.
At some point, Fraga and his entourage also arrived at Camp Wilson. Tim Towell, Ambassador Duke’s aide, wondered what the Spanish officials were up to. Towell saw Fraga walking along the beach with a Spanish general and some members of the Spanish press. Curiously, the group seemed to be edging toward the water. Suddenly it dawned on him: Fraga was trying to pull a fast one. “He wants to swim alone,” said Towell. “He’ll be dipped if he’s going to share this with the American ambassador. This is his thing.”
Towell and Duke both realized that Fraga was about to upstage the ambassador. The two men looked at each other and said, “Holy shit!” Towell tore down the beach and burst into a tent. There he found a handful of Navy divers on break, lying on their cots. Towell, huffing and puffing, asked for help.
“The American ambassador needs a bathing suit,” he said. “We gotta go swimming instantly, it’s an emergency!” The divers said they had just come in from the water and their suits were dripping wet.
Doesn’t matter, said Towell — we’ll take what you have.
Moments later, Duke stepped into the tent, peeled off his European clothes, and wriggled into a wet bathing suit that Towell described as a “little damp jock strap.” Emerging from the tent, Duke jogged across the sand and caught up with Fraga just after he had entered the water. “Fraga’s been had, so what’s he to do?” asked Towell. “And in they go together.” Fraga, Duke, and a few others in the entourage splashed merrily in the sea for a few minutes, then returned to shore and chatted with reporters. Then the two men toured Palomares, greeted by cheering townspeople carrying neatly lettered signs — most likely not the handiwork of peasant farmers — praising America and General Wilson. “The humble of Palomares welcome the illustrious visitors,” read one sign. “We have blind faith in the justice of your plans,” said another. Afterward, Duke gave a short radio interview with Jay Rutherfurd of Mutual News Madrid:
Duke: It was with confidence and pleasure that my family and I enjoyed our swim here this morning. And soon thousands of visitors will follow our example and enjoy the beauties and the pleasures of this coast in Almería.
Rutherfurd: Mr. Ambassador, have our relations with Spain been affected?
Duke: Well, Mr. Rutherfurd, they were obviously put in jeopardy initially, to the extent that confusion and fears can always disturb relations. The Spanish government, quite understandably, was concerned as well by the possibly adverse effect on tourism, Spain’s most lucrative source of income, as you know. But as the facts began to emerge and fears to fade away, a new spirit entered into our relationship. In effect, we were drawn together in our adversity.
The swim was a public relations masterpiece, making news in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. An Associated Press photo of Duke and Fraga waving to the cameras made page one of The New York Times and was reprinted around the globe. American papers praised the ambassador, calling the swim daring and imaginative, a stunt that had taken guts and courage. “We think of our diplomats as men who do not mind being in hot water,” said The Dallas Morning News. “But Ambassador Duke may have been the first diplomat who had to prove the water wasn’t hot.” Variety summed up the enthusiasm with this headline: “Duke’s ‘Swim-in’ for Spanish Tourism Best Water Show since Aquacade.”
Letters poured in to the embassy from various luminaries:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
March 9, 1966
Dear Angie:
I’m glad your bathing suit finally got wet. Seeing it splashed all over today’s press reminded me that I can always count on you for the dramatic ideas. (Though it did look like you were more in danger of catching pneumonia than radioactive poisoning.)…
March 12, 1966
Dearest Angie—
How happy I was to see you coming out of the ocean — looking marvelous. That was such a wonderful thing of you to do — I was so proud of you. I hope you saw all the nice things that were written about you here….
THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
March 15, 1966
Dear Angie:
… I trust that excessive swimming has not made you radioactive. My love to Robin.
Yours ever,
Some letters arrived from lesser-known parties. Nathan Arrow, a forty-eight-year-old Spanish translator in Flushing, New York, had this to say:
March 10, 1966
Dear Mr. Ambassador:
…I can understand our Government’s desire to placate and assure the local residents of the area. I think, however, that it is completely ludicrous for you and Sr. Fraga Iribarne to go bathing in the freezing Mediterranean merely to prove that the waters are not radioactive. It is hardly likely that there will [be], or would have been, a great rush of Europeans and Americans to the bare and forbidding Almería coastline, particularly in the vicinity of Palomares and Mojácar. You and I both know, since we were there, that Palma, Formentor, Ibiza, Mahón, and many other points in the Balearics are far more conducive to tourism than is the barren and unappetizing coastline in Almería province. None of our protestations will assuage the worries of those poor tomato farmers in the Palomares area, so why should we make ourselves look ludicrous in trying to promote tourism, by the highest representative of the U.S. in Spain, no less, in that forsaken corner of the Iberian Peninsula….
Some journalists also turned a more cynical eye to the event. “Feel safer already?” asked Newsweek.
“Supposing a bomb is reported missing in Norway? In the winter?” asked a writer in The Times of London. “Perhaps in such cases the job could be suitably left to the Naval Attaché.” The Moscow publication Izvestia also weighed in, saying that Ambassador Duke should receive the “Order of the Bath” for his feat.
At least one paper questioned the airborne alert program that had led to the accident in the first place. “For many years,” read an editorial in The Boston Globe, it has been part of this nation’s defense setup to have bombers carrying nuclear weapons flying many hours, ready for nuclear war in case of attack. This may have been necessary in times of crisis, though it was already scary in 1961 to know that the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons contained the equivalent of 30 tons of T.N.T. for every person on the planet.
But today, when intercontinental missiles have better capability of delivery than airplanes, is it not time to call a halt to routine flights with nuclear weapons?
A few days later, Curtis LeMay added his two cents to the debate, taping an interview for CBS.
LeMay had retired by this point and, dressed in a gray suit and a striped tie, looked more like a midwestern businessman than a fire-breathing general. But the old man could still shoot plenty of sparks.
First of all, said LeMay, this whole Palomares business had been “exaggerated all out of proportion.” The newspapers were scaring people for no reason. The Air Force had had accidents before where a weapon had broken open and scattered a little radiation around. They had just gone in and cleaned it up, no big deal. “The chance of scattering radioactive material over a wide area,” he said, “does not exist.” And there was no danger of radioactive contamination at sea, even if they never found the fourth bomb.
The interviewer pressed LeMay. Is it really necessary, he asked, to have SAC bombers in the sky at all times, loaded with nuclear bombs and refueling in midair? Yes, replied LeMay, ticking off the reasons why. SAC’s primary mission is to prevent war. We need to be strong, and our enemies must know this. In order to be ready for war, we have to train for war with usable weapons. Furthermore, SAC has been refueling in the air for years. “The fact that we had an accident means nothing,” said LeMay.
The general ended with a warning and a plug for the airborne alert program. America’s deterrent force is not as strong as it was a few years ago, he said. Our enemies are moving faster; the gap is narrowing. Cutting down the manned bomber force, depending too much on missiles, would be a mistake. With manned bombers, he argued, SAC could offer more choices to America’s leaders. “A man can think and react and do things he never thought he’d have to.” If war began, he wanted “a thinking man, a loyal man,” at the controls. Not some mindless missile.
While the big shots handled public relations, Wilson’s men started loading barrels with contaminated soil and vegetation.
The Navy requested that a radiological survey team accompany the barrels back to the United States. However, they offered to dispense with this formality if each barrel was numbered and painted with the words “Poison Radioactive Material” on the top, bottom, and sides. The Air Force balked at the request. Such alarming labels were not, they said, “in line with the spirit of the operation.” After some discussion, the Navy agreed to carry the barrels with standard radiation warnings.
As the barrel loading continued, General Wilson and the Spanish military liaison, Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, held a meeting for the townspeople of Palomares and Villaricos. Wilson apologized for causing any hardship and thanked the villagers for their patience and cooperation.
“The payment of claims is now progressing satisfactorily and should proceed at a rapid pace,” he said. “It gives me great satisfaction to see a return to normalcy for this area.
“Although my camp will disband in the near future and we will be returning to our bases, I want to assure you that our close ties will continue,” he added. “We will be leaving with a great admiration for the people of this part of Spain, and I also hope that we will be leaving as your lasting friends.” On March 24, men moved the last barrel off the beach and onto the USNS Lt. George W. G. Boyce for shipment to Charleston. The ship left that day, carrying 4,810 barrels of Spanish soil. One chapter of the Palomares saga, it appeared, had closed.
There was still, of course, the matter of the missing bomb.
By early March, the land and sea searches were still plowing forward, but everyone was running out of ideas. A second team of ballistics experts had recrunched the numbers and come up with another high-probability area on land, which the Air Force duly searched. “By 1 March,” said SAC’s final report of the accident, “literally no stone had been left unturned, and no depths unplumbed. It was doubtful if any area of equivalent size, about ten square miles, was as well-known as this one.” With regard to the water search, the ballistics team interviewed the Garrucha pharmacist, took a second look at the contaminated debris, and ran the numbers again. They concluded that Messinger and the tail section could have been contaminated by dust rising from the broken weapons on the ground, rather than a midair breakup of bomb number four. Sandia engineer Bill Barton briefed Admiral Guest on March 1, concluding what the admiral already believed: that Simó Orts had probably seen bomb number four land in the water. Based on this new report, the secretary of defense authorized General Wilson to terminate the land search. The burden of finding bomb number four now fell squarely on Guest.
In Washington, officials in the Defense Department braced for a bad outcome. Guest’s job seemed impossible, and Pentagon insiders began to accept that the Navy would probably not find the bomb.
On March 9, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance created a “Search Evaluation Board” to evaluate Guest’s task force, putting the physicist Robert Sproull in charge. Sproull had worked in the Pentagon for two years as the director of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. He had recently returned to academia but still held high government clearances. Sproull was chosen for this job, he says, because he was “expendable.” “It was pretty clear that if the fourth one was not found, there’d be a congressional investigation, and mud all over the face of everyone,” said Sproull. “But if Congress made a monkey out of me, it wouldn’t hurt the Defense Department.” The Search Evaluation Board, also known as the Vance Committee, included representatives from every agency involved: the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, Defense, Navy, Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Labs. Vance ordered the group to “examine all implications of the search.” But its main job, everyone knew, was to figure out when, how, or if the Navy could safely abandon the search.
In early March, the group held a meeting that Sproull described as “very glum.” The committee had two major concerns: Spain and the USSR. “We were always looking toward Capitol Hill,” said Sproull, “how we would guarantee to the Congress that the Soviets would not pick it up and that it would not do any damage to the relations with Spain.” The men went home that day having decided little. They planned to meet again on March 16.
In anticipation of the next meeting, Admiral Leroy Swanson, the head of the Technical Advisory Group and also a member of the Vance Committee, sent a list of questions to Guest. He wanted to know, among other things, what percentage of Alfa 1 and Alfa 2—the top-priority areas — had been searched and when the task force would finish Alfa 1. He also wanted to know the probability that the bomb could have buried itself in the bottom mud and what sort of protective screen had been placed around the area before the Navy arrived. Swanson wanted answers by Tuesday, March 15, in time for the board’s next meeting. For Guest, the clock was ticking.
On the morning of March 1, Mac McCamis stood in front of an instrument panel, manning Alvin’s surface controls. The day’s search plan had put him in a rotten mood. Alvin had been searching the rough terrain of area B-29, a square inside Alfa 1, for a week, and it would dive there again today.
Mac thought they had covered B-29 frontways and back and the time had come to move on. This decision, however, like so many others, was not his to make. The Fort Snelling maneuvered into position and opened its well deck, allowing Alvin to sail out into the waves. Mac directed the Alvin pilots to dive. As the sub disappeared beneath the surface, Mac hatched a plan.
Today, three weeks after their arrival in Spain, Alvin pilots Bill Rainnie and Val Wilson were piloting the sub, with Frank Andrews as a guest observer. Andrews had asked Earl Hays, the senior scientist for the Alvin group, for a ride in the sub. Hays, who didn’t feel compelled to tell Admiral Guest who rode in Alvin or why, much less ask the admiral’s permission, often gave the observer spot to old friends and VIPs. Andrews, being both, squeezed in for the ride.
To dive, Rainnie and Wilson vented Alvin’s ballast, blowing a froth of bubbles to the surface. The sub, now five hundred pounds negatively buoyant, sank slowly toward the bottom. As Alvin descended, the passengers felt no sense of falling. The three men sensed movement only by looking out the portholes and watching the “snow”—swirling clouds of tiny organisms — moving upward as the sea grew dark. When Alvin neared the bottom, the pilot flipped a switch and dropped two stacks of steel plates weighing a total of five hundred pounds. Now neutrally buoyant, the sub could cruise the area without floating up or down. (To make smaller adjustments in ballast-up to two hundred pounds positive or negative — the pilot could use Alvin’s variable ballast tanks, which pumped seawater in and out.) When the time came to surface, Rainnie and Wilson would drop another five hundred pounds of steel plates and float to the surface. The plates would remain on the ocean floor, a trail of breadcrumbs marking Alvin’s path.
The pilots and observer had their eyes glued to Alvin’s three viewports — one in the front center and one on either side. (A fourth viewport, on the sub’s belly, was hidden by the floor and rarely used.) Each window was a Plexiglas cone twelve inches in diameter on the outside, tapering to five inches diameter on the inside. Observers peeking out these tiny windows could see only a narrow, V-shaped sliver of the world outside. Their fields of vision did not overlap; they could not see directly above, behind, or beneath the sub. Their view was further obscured by shadows, silt, and the distortion of water, which made outside objects appear closer than they were.
In Palomares, the visibility near the bottom was especially poor. On a good day, the crew could see about twenty feet. But if they accidentally brushed the bottom, the fine silt stirred into a dense cloud, an underwater sandstorm that could hang for fifteen to twenty minutes. And because the surface ship could position them within only a few hundred yards, pilots basically had to navigate on their own.
In order to steer a straight line, a pilot had to look at his compass, peer out the tiny porthole, get a glance at the bottom, and look back at the compass. It was, said McCamis, like trying to walk “a straight line in a snowstorm.” In much of the search area, the bottom stretched before them gray and featureless, with no vegetation or landmarks for guidance.
On March 1, as usual, Alvin was “flying a contour.” The area loomed with steep slopes and deep gullies, mimicking the mountains alongside Palomares. The plan called for Alvin to stay at a consistent depth while flying along an undersea slope, looking for something lying on the hillside and snapping photos along the way. When they had finished searching the area at one depth, they could move deeper.
Mac McCamis, however, had lost patience with B-29. He noticed that Alvin was near an adjacent search area, C-4, closer to the actual point where Simó had seen the “dead man” hit the water. Mac asked the support ship’s captain if he could “play stupid” and steer Alvin out of its assigned space.
“You’re the controller,” said the captain. “Why not?”
McCamis seized the moment and sent the sub into the new area. Near the end of the dive, pilot Bill Rainnie spotted something on the bottom.
“Wait a minute, I see something,” Rainnie said.
“What?” Wilson asked.
“I’m not sure, a little to the left, that’s it, no, dammit, you went over it, to the right.”
“What?”
“To the right, dammit! That’s it, right on target.”
“What is it?”
It’s nothing, Rainnie said. Never mind.
The pilots saw nothing else of interest and surfaced soon afterward. Mac’s gamble, it seemed, had been a bust.
When they arrived back on the Fort Smiling, the pilots handed off their film for developing. That night at their briefing, the Alvin crew gathered around the latest batch of photos. Mac, looking at the pictures, spotted something odd — a curious track in the sediment. It looked, he said, “like a barrel had been dragged over the bottom, end to end.” Brad Mooney agreed with Mac. “To me, it looked like a torpedo had slid down,” said Mooney. “It had a curved shape to it, all the way down.” The pilots were excited. What they were seeing, they hoped, was the track of bomb number four sliding down the undersea slope. The next day, this time with official permission, the Alvin crew returned to the area to look for the track. They couldn’t find it. They returned on March 3, 4, and 7, combing the bottom, going over and over the area where they had photographed the track. Nothing.
On March 8, the day of Ambassador Duke’s swim, the task force suddenly yanked Alvin off the trail and sent her to search a shallow inshore area. Near the beach, some undersea gullies plunged too deep for Navy divers to search. Most likely, Admiral Guest had sent Alvin to investigate these gullies so he could check another square off his chart. But whatever the admiral’s intentions, the Alvin crew received no explanation for the sudden change and no information about when they could return to the promising track. The move, which seemed completely arbitrary, demoralized the crew and hardened their attitudes toward Guest. “My turn at surface control,” grumbled Mac, “and we’re still messing around in 800 feet of water.”
By the third week in March, the mood of the searchers had settled into a mix of frustration, boredom, determination, and despair. Alvin moved back to deeper water but couldn’t find the mysterious track. Aluminaut, likewise, was coming up empty-handed. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, Task Force 65’s only unmanned deep search system, made nine runs over a dummy test shape and couldn’t find it. On March 12, an OBSS towed by the USS Notable snagged a ridge, snapped its line, and never came up from the bottom.
The divers had wrapped up most of their inshore search, leaving Red Moody without much to do.
Guest asked the long-faced Moody if he wanted to head home to Charleston. With little work left for him in Spain, Red agreed. On March 14, Red Moody flew to Rota Naval Air Station to catch a plane home.
Ambassador Duke, picking up on the mood in Palomares and catching wind of the shifting tone in Washington, sensed that the search might soon be called off. Trying to ensure his role in the endgame, Duke wrote to Jack Valenti, special assistant to Lyndon Johnson: Madrid, March 14, 1966
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Jack:
Word has reached me that Cy Vance is heading up an interdepartmental group to cover all aspects of the search and recovery operations in connection with the nuclear weapon problems here in the Palomares area of Spain.
This brings to mind the possibility that the search for the missing device might be called off. The Spanish Government, of course, is not unaware of this possibility, and I foresee no irreparable damage to our relationships if such a decision is handled extremely carefully and properly. Through other channels I am suggesting to the Department that thought be given to my being called back to go over in great detail how such a step should be handled. I have in mind recommendations such as a hand-carried letter from the President to the Chief of State here giving him personal reassurances in the matter.
I write you now (events happen so fast) in order to head off any possibility of premature announcements, either at the White House level or State Department level, before I would be given an opportunity to be heard and subsequently empowered to handle the matter at this end. The manner in which the Palomares incident is terminated will be of great importance not only in Spain but to every nation in the world where there are nuclear overflights or bases.
With every best wish,
Sincerely,
On the following day, Tuesday, March 15, Tony Richardson, the baby-faced mathematician analyzing the search for Admiral Guest, sat on a small boat skipping across the waves toward Camp Wilson. Along with a WHOI oceanographer named John Bruce, Richardson planned to pick up Simó Orts and revisit, once again, the area of his parachute sighting. The Navy searchers worried that they had misread Simó’s point and were searching the wrong area. Perhaps another outing with Simó, now widely known as “Paco de la Bomba,” could set their minds at ease.
Richardson arrived at Camp Wilson around 10 a.m. to meet Simó and the Navy men who had driven the fisherman from Aguilas. The group climbed back onto the boat and headed out to the minesweeper USS Salute. Over coffee, the men discussed the search. Simó told the group that he had taken a fathometer tracing on the day of the accident — perhaps it contained some clues. He also let the men in on a plan. By attaching some small lines and hooks to his trawling nets, he said, he could probably grab the bomb’s parachute. If the Navy didn’t find it soon — or abandoned the search — he just might go out there and snag it himself.
While Simó and his group chatted, Admiral Guest sat on the USS Boston. His response to the Cyrus Vance committee was due in Washington that day, and Guest and his team had been working on it for four days. The long memo answered all the committee’s questions in comprehensive detail. In it, Guest explained Richardson’s search effectiveness probability, estimating that he needed thirty more working days to bring Alfa 1 to 95 percent. For Alfa 2, he would need only twelve more days. There was, however, an undersea canyon stretching between the two search areas, its slopes and floor slimy with ooze. The weapon could be lying there, completely buried in the mud, invisible.
On that same morning, the Alvin crew prepared for their last dive in the area where they had seen the track. They were supposed to get a new transponder installed that morning to allow the Mizar to track them within about 130 feet. After that, they would be transferred to Bravo, a secondary search area. However, when the new gear arrived, it required two days of bench testing before installation in Alvin. Knowing that Alvin would be sitting idle, Brad Mooney nagged Admiral Guest for another day in C-4. Guest brushed him off. The area had already been searched to 98 percent. It was time to move on. But Mooney persisted. “All right, goddamn it,” Guest told Mooney. “One more day, and that’s all.”
That day Mac McCamis and Val Wilson piloted the sub, with a WHOI technician, Art Bartlett, tagging along as the observer. As the sub descended, Mac spoke to Bill Rainnie, who was the surface controller that day. Mac told Rainnie to put them right on the elusive track, because today was his son’s birthday.
Alvin drifted down, and almost as soon as the sub reached the bottom, Wilson saw the track. He snapped pictures and shouted directions to McCamis, as the pilot struggled to hover near the track without stirring up clouds of silt. Soon Mac could see the track out the front window — it seemed to head down a steep slope, about 70 degrees. Mac decided to follow the track by backing down the slope, so he could see it out the front window. Slowly, Mac edged down as Bartlett and Wilson called out directions. The sub reached about 2,500 feet. Then, the two men started shouting, “That’s it!” “That’s it!”
Outside, on the gray bottom, lay a massive parachute. Underneath, the men saw the shape of a bomb.
The task force had established code words for the search. If the Alvin pilots spotted the bomb, they were supposed to say the words “instrument panel.” Wilson, in his excitement, forgot the code and shouted over the phone, “We found a parachute and we believe we have a fin of the bomb in sight! It’s underneath the parachute!”
“Had a hell of a time shutting him up,” said Mac.
That morning, the USS Albany had arrived to relieve the Boston as Task Force 65’s flagship.
Admiral Guest invited the Albany’s captain to lunch before the ceremonial transfer of the flag.
During lunch, an aide burst into the room to hand Guest a slip of paper. The note read, “ALVIN reports INSTRUMENT PANEL.” Guest read it, rose from the table, and hurried off without explanation. Someone else would have to handle the ceremony.
On board the minesweeper USS Salute, lunch was also under way. Tony Richardson, Simó Orts, and the others had just started eating when the commanding officer entered the wardroom to tell the group that Alvin had sighted the weapon. The Navy men rushed off, leaving Richardson and Bruce to escort Simó back to the beach. When the group arrived at Camp Wilson, an Air Force helicopter flew them to Aguilas. John Bruce, the oceanographer, arranged to visit Simó the next evening to look at the fathometer trace. After all, there was still a chance that the Alvin crew was wrong.
Deep below the surface, Val Wilson snapped pictures of Alvin’s prize. Then Mac eased Alvin away from the parachute to avoid tangling the submersible in the straps or shrouds. He wedged the sub into a crevice just below the chute, so they could keep an eye on it and not accidentally drift away in the current. Then he shut off the lights to conserve power and waited for instructions from the surface. One of the men reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Smoking was, of course, prohibited in the sub. But the three men, all heavy smokers, knew they might be down there for a while and decided to give it a go. Bartlett, the technician, knew the air system inside and out and figured he could pull this off without incinerating or suffocating the crew. He turned up the oxygen, gave the crew a good blast, then shut it off. They lit the cigarette and passed it around, inhaling deeply. Then Bartlett cranked up the CO2 scrubber, hoping for the best. McCamis and Wilson, having both served on submarines, could sense when the CO2 approached the danger zone. At least that’s what they told Bartlett, who watched the gauges and hoped they were right.
While they waited, the men discussed what to do if they accidentally hooked the bomb or the chute.
They all agreed that they could just drop a battery and surface, dragging the bomb with them.
Alvin’s total battery weight, however, was only about 750 pounds. The bomb weighed more than two tons. There was no way they could pull it up. The military had never told the Alvin crew how much the secret weapon weighed. It was the mushroom theory, said Bartlett: “Feed them shit and keep them in the dark.”
On the surface, Admiral Guest and Brad Mooney discussed options. Alvin could remain submerged for twenty-four hours — tops — if the pilots conserved power, meaning it had about twenty hours left.
Mooney suggested sending Aluminaut down to rendezvous with Alvin. If the larger sub carried a transponder, the surface ship Mizar could fix her position when she got near the bomb. The rendezvous was a risky proposition, and Mooney knew it. At that depth, the silt and snow scattered light, allowing even powerful beams to pierce only about sixty feet. And depending on a sub’s momentum, sixty feet might be too short to stop if the pilot suddenly saw trouble ahead. Generally, pilots avoided running two submersibles anywhere near each other under the sea. Mooney wanted to break this rule. What he proposed was much like sending two cars to meet in a midnight blizzard, on an icy road unfamiliar to both drivers. It would be dangerous, but it was their best option.
Guest readily agreed to the plan, liking the idea of keeping human eyes on the target. But he had difficulty comprehending the risk involved. “I can fly my F4s wingtip to wingtip at Mach speed and they don’t hit each other,” he told one staffer. “You guys can’t even go in the same area and stay out of each other’s way?”
Mooney summoned Aluminaut. The sub picked up a transponder, got a quick battery charge, and hustled over to the search area. Though disappointed that Alvin had found the bomb first, the crew was glad they had an important role to play On the way down, Admiral Guest and his staff told the Aluminaut crew, more than once, not to touch the bomb or try to recover it. “He thought we were a bunch of wild cowboys down there,” grumbled Art Markel.
The Alvin crew sat in the dark, on the bottom of the cold sea, for eight hours, waiting for Aluminaut.
Finally, peeking through their windows, the crew saw the glow of lights in the distance. “It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” said McCamis. “A great silvery-pink monster, it looked like, with great green phosphorescent eyes coming up silent through the water.” Mac flipped on Alvin’s lights, giving Aluminaut a clear target. Aluminaut approached slowly, cautiously parking herself about twenty-five yards behind Alvin, in clear sight of the parachute. The Aluminaut held steady as Alvin left her station and rose to the surface.
Alvin surfaced after ten hours and twenty-three minutes underwater, her longest dive of the mission.
Mac sailed her to the Fort Snelling and entered the well deck at 8:12 p.m., just about the time that Guest and his staff arrived on board. The Alvin crew sent their photographs to be developed, then told the admiral what they had seen. The photographs were ready about midnight. The weary Guest gathered his key staff members to look at the pictures. They didn’t see a bomb. They saw a parachute. Everyone agreed that the weapon probably lay shrouded underneath, but they couldn’t tell for sure.
Mac McCamis was outraged. He knew it had to be the bomb. Guest asked him, “How do you know it’s not a parachute full of mud?” To which McCamis replied impatiently, “What else is going to be down there with a parachute and a bomb rack hanging on to it?” McCamis went to bed that night discouraged. “In all my life,” he said, “I’d never had my intelligence so insulted.” After the meeting, Admiral Guest wrote a situation report to his superiors, sending it at 2:50 a.m. on March 16. In it, Guest said that Alvin had photographed a large parachute covering an object. The contact was promising but not conclusive; positive identification was impossible. However, he was starting to plan the recovery. He planned to proceed as slowly and deliberately as possible, but if the object started to slide down the slope, he might have to take immediate action. He would use three ships, Mizar, Privateer, and Petrel, as the primary support vessels for the recovery, with two minesweepers on security patrol. All other ships would attend to business as usual. Guest didn’t want the newsmen on shore to notice anything odd.
The other memo, the one for the Cyrus Vance committee that had taken four days to write, was never sent.
Early on the morning of March 16, Robert Sproull, the chair of the Cyrus Vance committee, went to the Pentagon for the group’s second meeting. Sproull expected this gathering to be as gloomy as the first. He arrived around 4:30 a.m. to gather his thoughts and prepare for the meeting. He checked the message traffic, just in case there had been any developments in Spain, and found Admiral Guest’s report. The second meeting, Sproull remembers, went off rather well.
That morning in Rota, a radioman found Red Moody at the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Moody had stayed out late the night before, drinking with an old friend. The messenger handed Moody a clipboard, the cover indicating that the note inside was classified. Red looked at the note and then at the messenger. “Tell them I’m coming back,” he said. He asked for an early flight.
That afternoon in Spain, Tony Richardson and John Bruce, the mathematician and oceanographer who had escorted Simó out to sea the day before, visited the fisherman at his house. Simó found the fathometer trace and unraveled it on the dinner table. John Bruce looked at the trace and questioned Simó. He saw nothing resembling the falling weapon.
The Americans told Simó that he would be paid for the previous day’s excursion — his boat had lost an entire day of fishing. Then Bruce, curious to see Simó’s fathometer, asked if they could visit the Manuela Orts. Simó agreed. The men boarded the ship, took a look around, and were impressed with the sleek vessel and its modern gear. When they finished, Simó offered to buy the men a drink, and they headed to a nearby tavern.
At the bar, Tony Richardson sipped a beer and watched news of the Gemini 8 space shot. The ship had launched from Cape Kennedy that morning and was due to orbit earth for three days. During that time, Gemini pilots planned to link the nose of their capsule with a satellite called Agena. If they pulled it off, it would be the first time two crafts had docked in space, a key component in the plan for landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
After a flawless start to the flight, Gemini docked to the satellite successfully. But shortly thereafter, a thruster on the spacecraft stuck open and set the linked vehicles spinning crazily The astronauts separated their capsule from the satellite and stabilized the craft, using rockets normally reserved for reentry. NASA ordered the crew to make an emergency landing in the Pacific. The astronauts were picked up after three hours at sea.
The outer-space drama received massive news coverage: a banner headline on the front page of The New York Times, with more than two full pages of stories. Alvin and Aluminaut’ s deep-sea rendezvous, the first time two submersibles had ever accomplished such a feat, remained secret.
The same day that General Wilson received Guest’s report, he sent three nuclear weapons experts to the Fort Snelling to look at the Alvin photographs. One man worked for the Atomic Energy Commission; the other two were EOD officers who had several years’ experience with the Mark 28.
The weapons experts showed the Alvin crew photos of a Mark 28 bomb, and they recognized it immediately as the object they had seen. “That’s it!” the crew said. The weapons team then examined the photos that Wilson had taken underwater. Although the parachute had wrapped itself around the object almost completely, the experts saw what appeared to be a lift lug. They also recognized the parachute as the right type for a Mark 28. Convinced that the Alvin crew had seen the bomb, the weapons experts took a boat to the flagship to tell Admiral Guest.
On board the USS Albany, the experts found Guest resistant to their news. “It is the opinion of my team that they had difficulties in convincing CTF-65 of similarities between the two sets of photographs,” wrote General Wilson in a secret telegram to his Air Force superiors the next day.
“Offers by my EOD team to assist in recovery operations and provide technical assistance met with cool reception.” Wilson promised to keep his superiors in the loop as new developments arose.
In the same message, Wilson also mentioned that both he and Guest had received marching orders from the embassy in Madrid. The identification and recovery of the weapon must be handled secretly. Only the embassy, working with the government of Spain, could make public announcements on the matter.
In Madrid, Duke was determined to keep the rest of this story under his control. If he played his cards right, the weapon recovery could become a proud moment for the U.S. and Spanish governments, an example of how well the two countries had worked together to tackle a tough problem. In the upcoming base negotiations, Spanish officials would remember how well the Americans had handled the accident, scoring points for U.S. negotiators.
But on March 17, two days after Alvin found the parachute, Duke’s phone rang, and his vision of a smooth ride to the finish was shattered. The man on the phone was Harry Stathos, the Madrid bureau chief for UPI, who had just returned from a trip to Germany. On the plane, he had struck up a conversation with a Pan Am pilot, who had been out drinking with an Air Force colonel the night before. The colonel had told the pilot, who told the reporter, that the bomb had been found. Now Stathos asked Duke: Had it? Duke said simply, “No comment.” But the word was out.
Trying to nip this gossip in the bud, Duke decided to hold a press conference to announce the news officially. The ambassador was hosting a gala reception at the embassy that evening. He would talk to the press when the party ended. Staffers sent word to the press corps to assemble at the American Embassy at 1 a.m.
Meanwhile, Duke sent a telegram to the secretary of state. In light of the UPI news break, he said, he planned to make the following public statement:
The undersea vessel, Alvin, made contact on March 16th with an object lying in 2,500 feet of water approximately five miles off shore near Palomares. Military experts have evaluated underwater photographs taken of the object and believe it to be the missing nuclear weapon. Actions are being taken to recover the device. The photographs show a parachute attached to an object with [sic] is similar in size and shape to the missing nuclear weapon. The parachute, however, is covering part of the object preventing positive identification. Experts who have examined the photographs indicate that the casing appears to be intact, thereby precluding any radioactive contamination in the water.
At 12:45 a.m., as reporters gathered in the embassy, Duke received a reply from the State Department, ordering him to cancel the press conference and say nothing. Instead, the embassy information officer, William Bell, read a telegram from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the assembled reporters: “There have been hopeful developments but I cannot give you further information at this time. If we have a positive identification and recovery, we will so inform you.” The reporters were furious. And the slight did not stop them from filing stories for the following day.
The articles were remarkably accurate. They reported that Alvin had found the bomb and parachute at 2,500 feet and that experts had seen photos and identified the weapon. A front-page article in The Washington Post also explained that the object rested precariously on an undersea slope a few miles off the coast of Palomares. “Recovery promises to be a delicate operation,” the article added. “Not only is the parachute-shrouded object already in deep water, but apparently it is balanced on the slope in such a way that a wrong nudge could send it rolling into even deeper water.” A page-one story in The New York Times predicted a fast recovery. According to officials, claimed the article, it would take only up to three days to recover the weapon. “No pictures of the bomb or the recovery operations would be permitted,” it added, “because of the highly secret nature of the material.”
Duke may have been unhappy about the news break, but he shared the reporters’ confidence. He was certain that Alvin had found the bomb but also felt, contrary to the Times’ report, that to ensure credibility the Navy must display the recovered bomb to Spanish officials and the press.
The military thought that was a terrible idea. First, there was the problem of logistics: nobody had ever recovered a weapon from this depth. Guest didn’t know how long the recovery might take or if it would go smoothly. He also had no idea if the weapon — if it was the weapon — was intact or broken and perhaps leaking radiation. As for the Air Force, it had no interest in showing a top secret H-bomb to the press. It had never displayed a nuclear weapon in public before. Why start now?
Confident that he could iron out these disagreements, Duke formed a committee to devise a plan for the public recovery and viewing. Looking ahead, he also drafted a press release, which he sent to the secretary of state on March 18 for review:
The fourth and final weapon from the January 17 crash near Palomares Spain has been recovered today and is enroute to the United States at this time. The casing was intact and no release of radioactivity into the coastal waters has occurred. The weapon was located on March 16 in 2500 feet of water, approximately five miles off shore by the submersible Alvin. Photographs taken at that time tentatively identified the object as the missing weapon. The recovery of this weapon brings to a close the search phase of the operation. All wreckage fragments and associated aircraft material of interest to the US have now been located and recovered.
Duke’s press release would prove extremely premature, his hope for a quick and easy recovery overly optimistic. The Navy might have found the bomb, but it had no way to lift it.
On March 16, McCamis and Wilson piloted Alvin back to the contact to relieve Aluminaut. Alvin, now outfitted with a transponder, could be guided by the Mizar almost directly to the target.
Aluminaut had been down for twenty-two hours, babysitting the parachute-covered object. As they approached the larger sub, the Alvin pilots could see that it had parked itself at an angle, with its nose toward the bottom and its stern floating upward. The Alvin pilots approached the Aluminaut slowly, finally stopping just behind its elevated stern. At that moment, someone in the Aluminaut decided to walk to the back of the sub in order to use the urinal. As he did, the sub dipped its rear end toward Alvin, whose pilots squawked with alarm. McCamis grabbed the joystick and scooted Alvin off to the right. Then Aluminaut took off for the surface, showering Alvin with steel shot and mud from her underside.
After recovering from these indignities, the Alvin pilots settled in for another shift. They had returned to keep an eye on the object, not attempt a recovery. Alvin by now had a mechanical arm with a reach of six feet, a rotating wrist, and two pincers like a lobster claw. They used the arm to place a transponder near the bomb, so the Mizar could find the weapon when Alvin left. But the arm couldn’t lift the bomb. Outstretched, the arm could carry twenty-five to fifty pounds. Or it could hang on to two hundred pounds in the crook of the elbow. (Aluminaut would eventually have two arms with similar lifting ability, but they hadn’t arrived in Spain yet.) There was no way Alvin could lift a two-ton nuclear weapon.
Guest needed another way to raise the bomb. As McCamis and Wilson began their second vigil in the dark, the admiral’s staff began to lay their plans.
On March 22, 1966, CBS News aired a thirty-minute special report called “Lost and Found, One H-Bomb.” The show opened with the anchor, Charles Kuralt, seated before a two-color map of Spain indicating only two cities: Madrid and Palomares. “We live in a world in which it is possible to mislay a hydrogen bomb,” intoned Kuralt. “That is the central fact of the drama in Spain.” He continued:
With thousands of men and millions of dollars and a flotilla of fifteen ships and with luck, we have apparently also found it, lying on the bottom of the sea. With the concurrence of the dark Mediterranean, it now seems likely that it will even be recovered and put in a safe place. But for the sixty days that one of our H-bombs was missing, worried people in the village of Palomares and thoughtful people everywhere asked, “Could it explode?” “Could it leak poisonous radiation?” “Could somebody else find it and put it to use?” Those are awesome questions but, considering the nature of the loss, not unreasonable ones.
Later in the report, CBS showed a long scene from the movie Thunderball, then cut to a shot of Deep Jeep being hoisted from the water. (The Navy had already sent Deep Jeep back to the United States, but the journalists were apparently unable to resist its photo-friendly bright yellow hull.)
“This is not a search for a fictional missing H-bomb, this is a search for a real one,” said Kuralt. “If it looks a little like Thunder-ball, that is a comment on how fantastic fact has become lately.” Kuralt wrapped up the program with a shot of the blue Mediterranean, the hills of Palomares rising in the distance. “The bomb has not yet been brought to the surface, but it must be,” he said solemnly.
“Because if we don’t recover it, there remains the nagging, distant possibility that someone else will.”
For about a week, Red Moody, now back on the task force, had been working on a plan. The key problem was getting a line down to the bottom, one heavy enough to support the weight of the bomb. Alvin or Aluminaut could carry a very light line. But if a submersible stretched a heavy line from a surface ship to the bomb, the force of the line in the current could overwhelm the sub’s engines and sweep it off course.
Working with two consultants to the task force, Ray Pitts and Jon Lindbergh (a diving expert and son of the famed aviator), Moody designed and built a gangly contraption called POODL. The curious name, a contraction of Pitts, Moody, and Lindbergh, had nothing to do with POODL’s appearance or duties. POODL looked nothing like a poodle; it was a seven-foot-tall steel frame shaped like a giant shuttlecock and mounted with a slew of items: several pingers and transponders so the Mizar could track the device, a strobe light, a bucket containing 190 feet of carefully coiled nylon line with a grapnel on the far end, and another 150 feet of coiled nylon line ending with a hook.
Aboard the Mizar, Moody and his team rigged up a length of 3½-inch nylon line with a breaking strength of 22,000 pounds. At the end they attached an anchor; thirty-eight feet above the anchor, they fastened POODL with a wire strap. In addition to the lines carried by POODL, they attached another 300-foot line, with a grapnel on the end, to the anchor itself. The plan was to lower the entire contraption-anchor, POODL, and all — into the water and, they hoped, land it near the bomb.
Then Alvin could swim over, pick up the three lines, and dig the hook and grapnels into the parachute.
That was the plan, anyway. Lieutenant Commander Malcolm MacKinnon, a naval engineer on Guest’s staff, took one look at the half-built POODL and winced. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “It was really a kludge.”
MacKinnon was not being overly critical. Even Moody admitted that they had “gypsy-engineered” the rig. But POODL was the best and quickest option they had. The weapon’s position was precarious, and the Navy worried that the bomb could slip down the slope into deeper water or fall into an underwater crevice and disappear forever. That fear overshadowed everything.
So on March 23, the captain of the Mizar positioned the ship over the bomb. Red Moody and his team dropped the anchor, with POODL attached, off the Mizar. Soon, the anchor and POODL hit bottom, their line stretching to the surface. Sailors grabbed the line, hooked it to a buoy, and floated it on top of the water. Then they waited to see what Alvin could do.
POODL was not the Navy’s first recovery plan. Soon after Alvin had found the bomb, it had carried a light line down to the bottom. The end of the line was tied to a fluke, which the Alvin pilots dug into the sediment near the bomb. The Navy planned to slide a heavier line down this messenger line, but when they tried, the fluke pulled out of the bottom. On March 19, the task force members tried another tactic: they coiled some lines on the Mizar’s instrument sled and tried to float the sled near the bomb. But the Mizar crew couldn’t hold the sled steady, and they abandoned that plan, too. After this attempt, McCamis and Wilson visited the bomb in Alvin and reported that it had slid twenty feet downslope. That evening, Admiral Guest wrote a pessimistic situation report to his superiors. He faced bad weather, untested equipment, experimental techniques, a precarious target position, and submersibles that needed constant maintenance. He warned that the recovery might take a while.
Other ideas arose. Art Markel thought Aluminaut could lift the bomb and devised a plan. On its hull, Aluminaut carried a camera mount that could pan and tilt, and Markel proposed building a makeshift arm by attaching a wooden or metal pole to the camera mount. The pole would carry a metal hook, which the pilot could loop into the parachute. The hook would be attached, via cable, to Aluminaut’s emergency ballast, a 4,400-pound lead weight on its belly. Then, with the bomb securely hooked to the ship, Aluminaut could blow its ballast tanks and rise to the surface, with enough buoyancy to pull the bomb with it.
Markel was excited about the plan, mentioning it in several letters to Reynolds. This was Aluminaut’ s chance, he wrote, to share some of Alvin’s limelight. But Guest rejected the idea. If Aluminaut got into trouble, he reasoned, she might have to drop her emergency ballast, leaving him with a new problem: a two-ton bomb hooked to a 4,400-pound lead weight. Guest never explained his reasoning to the Aluminaut crew, however, and this brush-off — the latest in a string of them — left the crew bitterly disappointed. “It is quite apparent that CTF 65 does not want Aluminaut in the act if they can help it,” Markel wrote. “I am quite disgusted over this whole mess.” Markel had half a mind to take his lifting rig to the sunken ship of antiquity and hoist a cannon to the surface. That would show the world what Aluminaut could do.
As the recovery plan slogged forward, the press got antsy. On March 22, the Los Angeles Times ran a pessimistic front-page article that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. The headline read, “H-Bomb May Slip into Deep Sea Crevice, Balk Recovery.” The article reported that the weapon was teetering on the edge of a steep undersea slope, in imminent danger of sliding into the abyss. “American officials here and at the scene are more pessimistic now about the situation than at any time since the search began,” said the article. “They are depressed at having come so near only to face the possibility that a stray undersea current and the peculiar bottom topography may rob them of success.”
Duke, disturbed by such gloomy press, asked permission to release regular progress reports without consulting the government of Spain. It is unclear whether he ever received a reply. But it is doubtful that Admiral Guest would have wanted to cooperate with such a plan; he had little interest in keeping the world press informed of his every move. In fact, he and his staff had become increasingly alarmed by the detailed information regularly appearing in the papers. There was a leak somewhere, and they didn’t like it. The Air Force thought that someone in the Pentagon was talking to Washington reporters or that someone at Camp Wilson was chatting with the press. But Guest suspected the embassy in Madrid, perhaps even the ambassador himself. He didn’t know Duke well, but he disliked the ambassador and didn’t trust him. There is no evidence, however, that Duke passed illicit information to the press. Indeed, he seemed as mystified by the leaks as anyone.
On the morning of March 23, soon after Red Moody sent POODL to the bottom, McCamis and Wilson flew Alvin over to have a look. Mizar had landed the anchor and POODL about eighty feet from the bomb. When Alvin arrived at the site, the pilots saw that POODL had landed on the bottom and fallen over, spilling its lines into a tangle. Alvin tried to reach through the metal bars to grab the lines but couldn’t. It then picked the remaining line off the anchor and tried to attach it to the billowing chute. With the pilots still getting used to the mechanical arm, the job proved difficult.
Finally, they hooked the line into the parachute. But by that time, Alvin’s battery had run low and the sub had to surface. At the debriefing, the pilots reported that the bomb had moved about six feet and now rested in a small ravine.
The next day, Wilson and McCamis dove again. Again, they couldn’t clear the tangled lines from POODL. They returned to the anchor line, which was already attached to the parachute, and tried to connect it more firmly. Alvin grabbed the grapnel and slowly, painstakingly twisted it into at least six parachute risers. Then the parachute billowed, and Alvin backed off. The pilots reported the news to the surface: they had snarled the grapnel in the chute. And, they added, the other two lines remained fouled on the POODL. The pilots couldn’t possibly reach them.
Guest’s staff met aboard the Mizar. The admiral did not want to lift the bomb with only one line, which seemed way too risky. But his staff pushed him to try. The breaking strength of the attached line, they argued, was ten times the weight of the weapon and rig combined. If they waited, the grapnel might work itself loose, or the line could tangle. Bad weather posed a constant threat. If the wind blew up, it could cancel operations for days. Washington and Madrid were losing patience. The sooner they recovered the bomb, the better.
Guest didn’t like the idea. But eventually he was persuaded.
Guest’s staff made a plan. Mizar would hover directly above the bomb, then winch it straight up through its center well, or moon pool. Once the bomb was safely off the seafloor, Mizar would pull it slowly toward shallow water, winching it up along the way. When the bomb was about 100 feet below the surface, EOD divers would attach two sturdy wire straps, and the bomb could be hoisted aboard a ship.
McCamis, still underwater in Alvin, heard that Mizar was going to attempt the lift. He asked if Alvin could stay submerged so the pilots could observe the operation. The answer came from the surface: No. It was too dangerous for Alvin to linger during the lift. The pilots were ordered to surface.
Meanwhile, Red Moody was having his own argument with the captain of the Mizar. Moody worried that the Mizar couldn’t hold position directly above the weapon. He suggested that the captain place landing craft, known as Mike boats, on either side of the ship to hold the Mizar steady.
The captain refused, saying he could maneuver his ship without help. Moody gave up, and the lift got under way.
The Mizar’s crew snagged the floating buoy tied to the anchor and the POODL. They jettisoned the buoy and attached the lift line to the ship’s winch. Moody and Jon Lindbergh stood by the Mizar’s moon pool to watch the operation. Guest and members of his staff waited in the ship’s laboratory, watching the instrument panels. At about 7:30 p.m., Mizar’s winch began to turn. Guest started to pray.
After about an hour, the instruments noted a slight strain as POODL rose off the seafloor. Fifteen minutes later, the rope took a heavy strain: the anchor had cleared the bottom. Slowly, the winch turned. The line grew steadily more taut, but the instruments showed that the strain was not severe.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. The instruments showed another strain. The bomb had lifted off the bottom.
Three minutes later, the instruments jumped. Moody and Lindbergh, watching the line, saw it suddenly go slack. Staring at the loose line, Lindbergh felt a terrible sinking feeling. Moody thought,
“Oh, shit.”
The winch took another long hour to reel in the anchor. The line below the anchor — the one that had been attached to the bomb — ended in a frayed stump. The bomb itself was gone. Looking at the mangled rope, Lindbergh guessed that about three fourths of the strands had been cut cleanly on some sharp object. The rest had just split.
Moody later discovered that Mizar had, in fact, drifted off course while raising the bomb. The captain had cut power while the winch turned, sending the ship drifting toward shore and likely dragging the bomb upslope before lifting it. But it’s not clear if Mizar’s drift snapped the line. The line could have fouled on the anchor flukes, rubbed on a sharp rock, or even cut itself on the POODL. Perhaps the nylon line was too prone to splitting or this particular line was defective.
Nobody ever figured it out for sure.
McCamis and Wilson were eating dinner when they heard the bad news. “Oh, boy,” said Mac. “Now we got to go find it again.”
Alvin needed a battery charge and repairs to her ballast system and couldn’t dive again for almost a full day. The admiral ordered Aluminaut to head down and look for the bomb. Several times, Mizar reported that the sub passed within 100 feet of the weapon’s former position, but the Aluminaut crew saw no sign of it. After five hours of searching, they were ordered to surface to avoid disturbing the bottom further. When Alvin returned to the weapon site on the evening of March 25, the bottom was scored with deep gouges. “The slope looked [as] if it had been torn up by bulldozers,” said Mac. The pilots found chunks of stone, clay, and mud, but no bomb.
The broken line seemed like a small mishap — an unlucky break rather than a tragedy. The recovery team hadn’t moved the weapon far from its original resting place, and they knew where they had dropped it. How far could it have gone? Surely, the subs would soon find it again. So, as Task Force 65 combed the ocean floor, the embassy staffers didn’t panic. Instead, they continued to argue about how to display the bomb when Guest finally brought it up. Ever since word had leaked out that the bomb had been found, an international chorus had been offering suggestions and making demands.
The Soviet newspaper Izvestia called for an international commission to verify the discovery, witness the bomb raising, and judge if the bomb had leaked any radiation. U.N. Secretary General U
Thant privately suggested inviting the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) to verify the recovery. American officials balked at both suggestions. The Soviet Union was a member of the IAEC, and the military certainly didn’t want a mob of Communist scientists poking around its top secret weapon.
There was still the question of logistics, as well. The embassy wanted Duke, Spanish Vice President Muñoz Grandes, and other VIPs to witness the actual bomb raising. Wilson opposed this idea: the bomb might be dangerous and should be rendered safe before VIPs showed up. Should he keep Muñoz Grandes, the number two man in Spain, waiting in a tent, maybe for days? Guest agreed.
Military officials hated the idea of displaying the bomb in public. If they had their way, they would raise the bomb in secret, pack it into a box, and ship it back to the United States under cover of darkness.
Duke knew this was impossible. Finding this slender bomb in the depths of the Mediterranean had been a nearly impossible task. If the Americans didn’t show the bomb to the world, nobody would believe they had really found it. Rumors would linger for years; the story of the accident would never die. So when Duke reached an impasse with Wilson and Guest, he broke protocol and called Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A serious breach of diplomatic decorum, the call was the only time, Duke claims, that he directly crossed the divide between State and Defense. McNamara was a friend, and the ambassador was desperate. On the phone, Duke argued his position, and McNamara agreed that the find had to be verified. Together, the Departments of Defense and State ordered Wilson and Guest to come up with a plan that would satisfy everyone.
Developing a plan for public display soon seemed less urgent, however. As one day stretched into another with no sign of the bomb, Guest’s hope faded. Days passed. Then a week. The bomb seemed to be hiding.
Among the members of Guest’s staff, the tension ramped up a notch. Red Moody felt personally responsible. The dropped bomb had been an accident, but Moody had played a large part in the recovery operation and shouldered his share of the blame. The mood on the USS Albany was bleak.
“Here we were in the ninth inning, and the score is zero to zero,” said George Martin, a Trieste pilot who had been sent to Palomares to augment the task force. “And the fans — we’ll call that the world opinion— was also at zero.”
The crew of the USS Albany, already operating at a higher state of readiness than usual, responded to the heightened tension. The flagship carried long-range TALOS missiles, which could deliver either conventional or nuclear warheads. Usually, the crew armed the missiles with conventional warheads. But on March 29, the gun crews aboard the Albany made the switch. The flagship now bristled with nukes of her own. The task force was ready for anything.
At the end of March, Duke received a secret cable from the Departments of State and Defense regarding nuclear overflights of Spain. The tone was urgent: Because arrangements for overflights of Austria, Switzerland, France or Morocco with nuclear weapons for various reasons not feasible, resumption such overflights of Spain extremely important not only in maintaining our tactical alert and dispersal plans but also in providing nuclear logistics support to forces in Mediterranean area. Restoration US overflights could have favorable in fluence elsewhere in world where such flights involved. Early approach Spanish authorities is desirable to seek resumption such flights through Spain…. Would like views on timing such approach in light current request on three squadrons and in relation recovery B-52 weapon.
Duke responded in a secret cable to the secretary of state. His tone was patient but annoyed, like a father explaining, once again, why his son could not play baseball in the living room. He reminded Washington that the Department of Defense had just asked the Spanish government to station three fighter plane squadrons at Torrejón and had considered transferring France-based Air Force engine facilities to Spain. He pointed out that the United States soon faced the problem of extending, and probably renegotiating, its valuable base agreement with the Spanish government. And, in case anyone had forgotten, there was still a hydrogen bomb lost somewhere in the Mediterranean.
“Timing of our demands, with an eye to international context, is important,” he wrote. “It would be patently inopportune to raise subject of resuming overflights carrying nuclear weapons before lost weapon safely recovered and entire incident well behind us.” Guest assumed that the weapon now rested upslope from its former position. Mizar, he guessed, had probably been dragging the bomb uphill before it lifted off the bottom. Bolstering this theory, when Alvin went down to look, the crew found a track leading up the slope. Everyone hoped that this track, like the one before, would lead them to the bomb.
But it didn’t. And after a few days of fruitless searching, the Alvin pilots began to imagine a different scenario. They suspected that the uphill track had been dredged by the dragging anchor, not the bomb. Maybe the bomb had dropped into its old track and skidded down the slippery slope. The Alvin pilots wanted permission to search downhill.
At a meeting with Guest, a member of the admiral’s staff raised the idea of letting Alvin look downhill. They even sweetened the pot by encouraging Guest to ride along as an observer. Admiral Guest turned down the offer: there was no way he was diving in a submersible, especially one built by civilians. But just to get the Alvin pilots off his back, he agreed to let them search downslope.
And he suggested that George Martin, who was standing nearby, take his place as observer.
On the morning of April 2, Alvin dove again, with Rainnie, McCamis, and George Martin inside.
The sub had cruised down to about 2,800 feet when Mac spotted an anomaly — a clod of dirt that seemed out of place. Nearby, they saw some more dirt that looked oddly displaced. Then, suddenly, they saw a parachute, still tightly wrapped around an object that they knew was the bomb. They had been searching for just over a half hour.
The elated crew announced their find to the surface and settled in to wait for another rendezvous with Aluminaut. As they had suspected, the bomb and chute had slid downslope, landing about 120
yards south of its previous position. It was deeper now — resting at about 2,800 feet — but lying on a gently sloping plain that seemed far less precarious. George Martin marveled at the sight; this long-sought object, so far under the sea. To commemorate the occasion, he pulled a 100-peseta note out of his pocket and asked his companions to sign it. Then he sat back, ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he had packed for lunch, and wrote a letter to his wife.
Red Moody heard a buzz on ship and asked what was going on. He was told that Alvin had found the weapon but it was wrapped tightly in the parachute and nobody knew if it was the same bomb or not. Moody laughed. “How many bombs do we have down there?” he asked. “Let’s just go get her, but do a better job this time.”