Bathysphere's trip to ocean depths had Cold War role

KEYPORT - It was a water rescue like no other — three miles down to the Pacific Ocean floor, for nothing more than a few reels of film.

But it was 1972, the height of the Cold War, and the precarious balance between the two superpowers threatened to tumble into disaster. And so the mission of the deep-sea submersible Trieste II remained shrouded in mystery until 40 years later, when newly declassified government files finally told the dangerous and daring story.

Several hundred people at Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport heard it firsthand Saturday from the men who led the mission undertaken by the U.S. Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency. They included Trieste II skipper Richard Taylor, Beauford Myers, commander of its support ship, USS White Sands, and Lee Mathers, former naval-intelligence officer.

The story begins in outer space in July 1971. A Hexagon-class U.S. spy satellite had finished shooting a batch of film and had tossed it in a parachuted capsule to a waiting plane. But the plane missed the catch and the precious film plummeted into the ocean about 400 miles north of Hawaii.

The frantic spy community scrambled. Would the Russians get the film? Or could the United States get there first? Had the film survived the impact, to say nothing of the 7,142 pounds per square inch of pressure present at 16,400 feet on the ocean floor?

They guessed yes. The Navy proposed sending the Trieste II, now displayed outside the museum, to fetch it.

That October, the White Sands, accompanied by the Navy tug Apache, toted the Trieste II in its belly to a 12-square-mile area where the CIA believed the film was located. Despite fearsome wind and waves, the White Sands circled tighter and tighter around its target before plopping the sturdy bathysphere into the waves. No one knew the facts of the mission or that the item they were to retrieve was film from a Hexagon satellite.

Unbelievably, they soon spotted the tattered chute on the ocean floor.

"They were thrilled; they had found the target," Mathers said. But the film was not with it.

A second dive in November netted nothing.

But then during a third dive in April 1972, "blind luck" visited, according to Mathers. Just feet from the Trieste II sat the golden and silver-colored film reels and their secrets, waiting undisturbed on the cold mud floor. Shouts of jubilation erupted inside the Trieste II and three miles above on the decks of the White Sands and Apache. The Trieste II crew reached out with a specially designed "hay hook," which grasped the precious prize.

Then the unthinkable happened.

"On the way to the surface, the package started to fall apart," Taylor said. He alerted divers from the White Sands to meet them and try to save the film. But by now, 6-foot ribbons of the film were twisting in the currents.

"I was absolutely devastated. Nine months for absolutely nothing. High expectations to absolute despair," Taylor remembered.

But the underwater rescue, deepest in history at that time, was called a success. The Russians

were watching close by, but didn't get it.

What was on the film that the CIA and Navy wanted so desperately? The men on the Trieste II mission didn't say exactly, and probably don't know.

But they did say that our country's leaders at the highest levels were somehow involved. President Richard Nixon would be engrossed in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty just months from then, starting in 1973.

"It must have been quite a concern," Mathers said.