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Secrets Beneath the Waves
In the vast, silent depths of the central Pacific Ocean, more than three miles beneath the waves, lay a trove of secrets. The wreckage of a Soviet submarine, lost in 1968, rested on the abyssal plain, far beyond the reach of any conventional salvage technology. To the Soviet Navy, its location was a mystery and its secrets were safe. But to the Central Intelligence Agency, the sunken vessel represented an intelligence opportunity of historic proportions. What followed was one of the most audacious, complex, and secretive operations of the Cold War: a six-year effort to build a revolutionary deep-sea recovery system under a meticulously crafted commercial cover story, all to snatch a piece of the Soviet Union’s most advanced military technology from the ocean floor. This is the story of Project Azorian.
A Ghost on the Seabed
In March 1968, the Soviet Golf II-class ballistic missile submarine K-129 was on patrol in the Pacific, hundreds of miles northwest of Hawaii. It was an integral part of the Soviet nuclear deterrent, carrying three R-21 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each armed with a one-megaton nuclear warhead. It also carried two nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Suddenly, the submarine, with its crew of 98, vanished. After weeks of failing to receive routine radio check-ins, the Soviet Pacific Fleet launched a massive and frantic search operation. Dozens of ships and aircraft scoured thousands of square miles of ocean, but they found nothing. The K-129 was gone, its fate and location unknown.
The United States heard something. The United States Navy maintained a sophisticated underwater acoustic surveillance network called SOSUS, a system of hydrophones laid across the seabed in strategic locations to track Soviet submarine movements. The SOSUS network detected an acoustic event – a series of sharp, violent sounds consistent with a catastrophic implosion – emanating from a specific point in the deep ocean. By triangulating the data from multiple sensors, American intelligence analysts were able to pinpoint the likely location of the K-129’s final resting place with a precision the Soviets couldn’t hope to match.
The U.S. Navy dispatched the submarine USS Halibut, a specialized vessel equipped for deep-sea search and espionage, to the suspected location. The Halibut carried the “Fish,” a 12-ton towed submersible packed with cameras, sonar, and lights. For weeks, the Halibut meticulously combed the seabed, dragging the Fish just above the ocean floor at a depth of 16,500 feet. In August 1968, after an arduous search, it found what it was looking for. The photographs transmitted back by the Fish were stunning: the broken hull of the K-129 lay on the silt, its sail tilted and a large gash in its side. The submarine was shattered but largely intact.
An intelligence goldmine was sitting on the ocean floor. Inside the wreckage were nuclear missile silos, nuclear torpedoes, and, perhaps most importantly, cryptographic equipment and codebooks that could unlock the secrets of Soviet naval communications. The potential to study Soviet missile technology, nuclear warhead design, and communications protocols was irresistible. The problem was the depth. No nation had ever attempted to recover an object of that size from 16,500 feet. It was an engineering challenge on a scale that bordered on science fiction. Yet, the temptation was too great to ignore. The decision was made at the highest levels of the U.S. government: they would go down and get it.
The Cover Story: A Billionaire’s Deep-Sea Venture
The solution was ingenious: deep-sea mining. In the late 1960s, there was growing commercial interest in mining the ocean floor for manganese nodules, potato-sized concretions of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt that litter the abyssal plains. The idea was commercially plausible but still technologically on the bleeding edge, providing the perfect excuse for developing novel and oversized equipment.
To give the cover story unimpeachable credibility, the CIA sought a partner from the private sector, someone whose reputation for eccentric, ambitious, and secretive projects was already legendary: Howard Hughes. The reclusive billionaire industrialist was a patriot with a long history of undertaking classified work for the U.S. government. His involvement would provide a perfect smokescreen. Any strange activities or massive expenditures could be attributed to the mysterious whims of Hughes.
A deal was struck. The CIA would fund the entire project, but it would operate under the public banner of a Hughes enterprise. A new company, Summa Corporation, was fronted as the parent entity, and the recovery ship would be known as the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The official story was that Hughes was embarking on a pioneering venture to harvest manganese nodules from the seabed, pushing the boundaries of marine engineering. The story was announced publicly, complete with press releases detailing the promise of this new frontier in mineral extraction. It was a cover so audacious and well-conceived that it was accepted without serious question by the public and the press.
An Engineering Masterpiece: The Hughes Glomar Explorer
With the cover story in place, the real work began. The CIA contracted Global Marine Development Inc., a company with expertise in deep-water drilling, to design and build the ship and its recovery system. The vessel, constructed in secrecy at the Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. in Pennsylvania, was a marvel of engineering, purpose-built for a single, unprecedented task.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was a vessel unlike any other. At 619 feet long and over 50,000 tons, it was massive. Its most striking feature was a giant derrick amidships, reminiscent of an oil drilling platform. This derrick wasn’t for drilling; it was for lowering and raising a colossal steel pipe string, section by section, to a depth of three miles. At the end of this pipe string would be the real heart of the operation: a massive grappling device.
Central to the ship’s design was a feature known as a moon pool, a large, 200-foot-by-74-foot opening in the bottom of the hull that allowed the recovery apparatus to be lowered directly into the ocean from the center of the vessel. This moon pool was concealed from view by a retractable seafloor, enabling the most sensitive parts of the operation to be conducted underwater, hidden from spy satellites and prying eyes.
To handle the immense weight of the three-mile-long pipe string and its payload, the ship was equipped with a heavy-duty gimbaled platform and a sophisticated heave compensation system. This system acted like a giant shock absorber, using massive hydraulic cylinders to keep the derrick and pipe string stable, even as the ship pitched and rolled in the Pacific swells. Without it, the stresses on the pipe could easily cause it to snap. The Glomar Explorer was also fitted with powerful thrusters on its bow and stern, all connected to an early dynamic positioning system. This system used sonar beacons placed on the seabed to keep the ship perfectly stationary over the target, a necessity for such a delicate deep-water operation.
Clementine: The Capture Vehicle
The device at the end of the pipe string was an even greater engineering feat. Known internally as the Capture Vehicle and nicknamed “Clementine,” it was essentially a giant, remotely operated claw. Designed by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, the vehicle was a behemoth, weighing thousands of tons. It was designed to be lowered over the target section of the K-129’s hull. Once in position, powerful hydraulic grappling arms, or “claws,” would close around the submarine, securing it for the long lift to the surface. The entire structure was designed to cradle the fragile, corroded hull without causing it to break apart further. After capturing the submarine section, the entire assembly – Clementine and its prize – would be slowly winched up through the pipe string and into the Glomar Explorer’s hidden moon pool.
Alongside the Glomar Explorer, a submersible barge, the Hughes Mining Barge (HMB-1), was constructed. This semi-submersible vessel had a retractable roof and was designed to conceal Clementine from view during transport and to facilitate its transfer to the moon pool. Every element of the system was engineered with both function and secrecy in mind.
The Lift: Operation in the Pacific
By the summer of 1974, after years of design, construction, and testing, the system was ready. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, with the HMB-1 and its hidden cargo in tow, sailed from California to the recovery site in the central Pacific. The crew was a mix of CIA operatives and professional drillers and sailors from Global Marine. The sailors were told they were on a top-secret test of a new deep-sea mining system; only a handful of CIA personnel on board knew the true nature of their mission.
Once on station, the operation began. The HMB-1 was ballasted down, its roof retracted, and Clementine was carefully maneuvered beneath the Glomar Explorer and attached to the bottom of the pipe string within the moon pool. Then, the slow, arduous process of lowering the capture vehicle began. For days, the crew worked around the clock, adding 60-foot sections of steel pipe one at a time and lowering the string deeper into the abyss.
Three miles below, Clementine descended through the darkness, guided by sonar and cameras. It took more than a week to reach the target. The operators on board the Glomar, watching grainy video feeds from the seabed, skillfully maneuvered the massive vehicle into position directly over the forward section of the K-129, the portion believed to contain the code room, missile control center, and nuclear torpedoes. With immense precision, Clementine was lowered over the hull, and the grappling claws were activated. They closed around the submarine, securing it. The most difficult part of the mission was a success.
The lift began. Slowly, powerfully, the massive winches and draw works in the Glomar’s derrick began to pull the pipe string, Clementine, and its precious cargo up from the seabed. The heave compensation system worked perfectly, smoothing out the ocean’s motion. For several days, the ascent was flawless. The secrets of the K-129 were rising toward the surface.
Then, disaster struck. About a third of the way through the lift, roughly two miles below the surface, a technical failure occurred. Several of the grappling claws on Clementine suffered a catastrophic structural failure and broke away. The sudden imbalance of forces caused the salvaged section of the submarine to fracture. A large portion of the prize – estimated to be about two-thirds of what had been captured – tore away and plunged back to the ocean floor, lost forever. Only the forward-most 38-foot section of the K-129 remained in Clementine’s grip. It was a heartbreaking setback, but the mission continued. The remaining piece was still an invaluable prize. The crew completed the lift, bringing the fractured remnant of the K-129 into the moon pool, finally hidden from the world.
Inside the recovered section, CIA teams found the bodies of six Soviet submariners, who were later given a formal military burial at sea, filmed by the agency. They also recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Critically the section did not contain the submarine’s code room or its ballistic missiles. The part of the submarine that broke off and fell back to the seabed was the very part that contained the most sought-after intelligence.
A Secret No More
Despite the partial failure, Project Azorian was a qualified success. The recovery of the torpedoes provided vital insights into Soviet nuclear weapon design, and the examination of the hull yielded information on Soviet metallurgy and submarine construction. Yet the grand prize remained in the abyss. The CIA began planning a second mission to go back and recover the rest of the wreck.
Before that could happen, the secret began to unravel. In June 1974, during the recovery operation, the Summa Corporation’s Los Angeles office was burglarized. Among the stolen items were documents connecting Howard Hughes to the CIA and the Glomar Explorer. This event set in motion a chain of journalistic inquiries. By early 1975, reporters, most notably Seymour Hersh of The New York Times and a team from the Los Angeles Times, had pieced together the main elements of the story.
The CIA, desperate to keep the operation secret to protect its methods and to potentially allow for a second recovery attempt, tried to persuade the media to hold the story on national security grounds. CIA Director William Colby personally appealed to editors. For a time, they complied. But the story was too big to contain. In February 1975, the Los Angeles Times broke the news, revealing the true purpose of the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The story of the secret submarine salvage became an international sensation.
The Soviet Union, which had been monitoring the Glomar’s activities with suspicion but was seemingly unaware of its true mission, was publicly outraged. The era of détente was strained by the revelation. In the United States, the disclosure sparked a debate about the balance between national security and freedom of the press. It was during this period that the now-famous “Glomar response” was born. When journalists filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to the project, the CIA responded that it could “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of such information. This legal tactic has been used by intelligence agencies ever since to deflect inquiries into classified matters. The public revelation of Project Azorian made any second recovery attempt politically impossible. The rest of the K-129 remains on the ocean floor to this day.
Summary
Project Azorian stands as a landmark in the history of intelligence and engineering. It was an operation of breathtaking ambition, pushing the known limits of technology to achieve a goal that seemed impossible. The creation of the Hughes Glomar Explorer and its unique recovery system under the guise of a commercial deep-sea mining venture represents one of the most elaborate and successful cover stories ever devised.
While the mission did not achieve all of its objectives due to the mechanical failure during the lift, it was far from a total loss. The intelligence gathered from the recovered section of the K-129 was significant. The operation demonstrated an American technological capability that stunned its adversaries and showcased the CIA’s capacity for long-range, high-risk technical operations. It remains a testament to the ingenuity and daring that characterized the shadow struggle of the Cold War, a secret project that, once revealed, captured the public imagination and left a lasting legacy on the worlds of intelligence, law, and marine engineering.
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