[BITList] A naval museum, is "a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money-sucking hole..."

[John Feltham]

The Wall Street Journal
  FEBRUARY 24, 2009
The Navy Has a Top-Secret Vessel It Wants to Put on Display
Sea Shadow and Its Satellite-Proof Barge Need a Home; Plotting in  
Providence

By BARRY NEWMAN
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels? The  
Navy has a pair it doesn't need anymore. It has been trying to give  
them away since 2006, and they're headed for the scrap yard if  
somebody doesn't speak up soon.

One is called Sea Shadow. It's big, black and looks like a cross  
between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile. It was made to escape  
detection on the open sea. The other is known as the Hughes (as in  
Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house,  
with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high.  
Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from  
spy satellites.



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The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever  
built, making it very handy -- as it was 35 years ago -- for trying to  
raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine.

"I'm fascinated by the possibilities," Frank Lennon said one morning  
recently. Mr. Lennon runs -- or ran -- a maritime museum here in  
Providence. He was standing in a sleet storm on a wharf below a power  
plant, surveying the 297-foot muck-encrusted hulk of a Soviet  
submarine that he owns. His only exhibit, it was open to the public  
until April 2007, when a northeaster hit Providence and the sub sank.

Army and Navy divers refloated it this past summer with the aid of  
chains and air tanks. Mr. Lennon can't help but imagine how his sub  
might look alongside the two covert Cold War castoffs from the Navy.  
"They would be terrific for our exhibit," he said, watching the sleet  
come down.

But a gift ship from the Navy comes with lots of strings attached to  
the rigging. A naval museum, the Historic Naval Ships Association  
warns, is "a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money- 
sucking hole..." Because the Navy won't pay for anything -- neither  
rust scraping nor curating -- to keep museums afloat, survival depends  
on big crowds. That's why many of the 48 ships it has given away over  
60 years were vessels known for performing heroically in famous battles.
Museum entrepreneurs like Mr. Lennon who don't have much money can  
only fantasize about Sea Shadow and its barge. After all, a pair of  
mysterious vessels that performed their heroics out of the public eye  
can't have much claim to fame. Glen Clark, the Navy's civilian ship- 
disposal chief, has received just one serious call about the two  
vessels, and it didn't lead to a written application.

The Navy's insistence on donating Sea Shadow and the barge as a twofer  
may also explain the lack of interest. Here is the Navy's vision for a  
museum display as Mr. Clark describes it:

"When you're driving down the road, you can't see the Sea Shadow. You  
have to pay for your ticket to go on board the Hughes Mining Barge,  
and then you see the Sea Shadow. That has the capability of preserving  
the aura of secrecy of the program."

Possibly. It might also cause drivers to drive right by the hulking  
rust-bucket without devoting a thought to stopping.


FRANK LENNON

The Hughes Mining Barge actually has nothing to do with mining or with  
the late, reclusive Mr. Hughes. He merely let the Central Intelligence  
Agency use his name in 1974 to cover up its mission to raise a Soviet  
submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

The adventure was publicized as the expedition of another new vessel,  
the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to mine for minerals on the seabed. To  
grab a sub, the ship needed a giant claw. But because it was big and  
unwieldy, the claw couldn't be installed in the ship at dockside.  
That's where the "mining" barge came in.

The claw was assembled inside it. According to Curtis Crooke, retired  
president of Global Marine Development Inc., the company that did the  
work, the barge with the claw inside was then towed off the California  
coast and submersed. The Glomar Explorer was positioned over it, and  
the claw hoisted into its belly.

Then the Explorer went sub hunting (exactly how much of the sub it  
retrieved, if anything, has never been declassified) and the barge  
went into mothballs.

"That's all it was used for," says Mr. Crooke, "to put the claw inside  
the Explorer." Would the barge work as a museum? "It's just a big old  
dumb barge," he says. "Now, the Sea Shadow, that's a way-out spacey  
kind of thing. You could tell a story about that."

The Glomar Explorer was refitted as a drill ship. The barge -- thanks  
to its satellite-proof roof -- got a second secret job for the Navy  
and its contractor, Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. In the early 1980s,  
Sea Shadow was assembled inside it. At a cost later put at $195  
million, it aimed to attain the same invisibility at sea that it had  
in the federal budget.

Sea Shadow, 160 feet long and 70 feet wide, was the Navy's first  
experimental stealth ship. Its special coatings, sharp angles and  
other confidential doohickeys allowed it to baffle radar and sonar.  
Viewed bow-on, it looks like a squat letter "A" standing on two  
submerged pontoons for exceptional stability on rough seas.

 From the start, Sea Shadow moved at night, towed from its California  
dock inside its barge and launched onto the open sea to sail on its  
own in darkness.

S.K. Gupta, now a vice president at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, was  
in the crew. He recalls watching a glass of Coke on the bridge barely  
ripple in 12-foot waves. In war games with the Navy off San Diego, he  
says, "We operated during the night with impunity. We could disappear  
and sneak up on whomever we wanted. Nobody thought we could do it. A  
ship is usually hard to hide."

The Navy brought Sea Shadow out of the shadows for daylight tests in  
1993, setting off a flash of publicity. It hit the cover of Popular  
Mechanics. Revell made a plastic model. A mad media mogul used a Sea  
Shadow look-alike to foment war between Britain and China in a 1997  
James Bond movie "Tomorrow Never Dies."

In 2006, its experimental life at an end, Sea Shadow and the barge it  
was boxed in were struck from the Navy's register and tied up in  
Suisun Bay, near San Francisco. The technologies it developed have  
sired a generation of land-attack destroyers and ocean-surveillance  
ships. "Sea Shadow is the mother of all stealth ships in the world,"  
says Mr. Gupta. It ought to be displayed out in the open on dry land,  
he thinks, its invisibility visible to all.

The Navy's Mr. Clark says, "We're looking at that option." In  
December, Sea Shadow got a one-year reprieve from the junk yard. And  
in Providence, Mr. Lennon got one more year to dream.

Retreating from the sleet, he was in the Sealand Diner eating  
breakfast with Ed Sciaba. Mr. Lennon is 66 years old and an ex-Green  
Beret. Mr. Sciaba, 54, is a scrap dealer ready to tow Mr. Lennon's  
sunken Soviet sub to his yard.
Mr. Sciaba knew nothing of Sea Shadow or the CIA's sub-raising  
venture. As Mr. Lennon recounted the details, he got excited.
"Hell of an idea," he said. "That's a museum I'd go to."
"You could tell the story of the Cold War," said Mr. Lennon.
Mr. Sciaba banged his coffee mug on the table. "Let's go get 'em and  
tow 'em back here!" he said. Mr. Lennon turned his gaze to the storm  
outside, and Mr. Sciaba picked up the check.

Write to Barry Newman at barry.newman at wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1


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