Project Azorian
At the height of the Cold War, a press statement was released that stated a purpose-built ship was dispatched to the Pacific for “manganese mining” by its eccentric billionaire owner. In reality, the American ship, with its iconic crane taking up the majority of the deck space, began the hunt for a sunken Soviet submarine on the ocean floor north-west of Hawaii. The ship’s goal was to find and raise the sub to the surface before the Soviet government could, allowing the U.S. a peek at secret Soviet submarine, missile, and cryptography technology. Whist this sounds like the plot of a pulpy spy novel you would buy in an airport kiosk; this secret mission really did happen and is known to us as Project Azorian. The extraordinary mission, undertaken by the American CIA with the assistance of famous billionaire Howard Hughes, occurred in 1974 using the ship USN Hughes Glomar Explorer built just for the recovery of the missing Soviet submarine K-129.
On 24 February 1968, the Soviet sub, K-129, started its third patrol, with an expected completion date in May of ’68. After completing a successful test dive, the submarine radioed in that everything was functioning normally and began its patrol. This is the last communication that K-129 would ever send and by the end of march, Soviet naval leadership declared the sub missing after it repeatedly missed scheduled radio check-ins and failed to respond to communications relayed directly to the sub. After a failed search for the sub using surface, arial, and underwater methods, the soviets called off efforts and declared the sub lost.
The Soviet search efforts in the north Pacific attracted the attention of the Americans who correctly surmised that the Soviets were searching for a missing sub and began to conduct their own search. The Americans had set up underwater acoustic listening devices to detect submarines or other strange activity and were able to triangulate a likely sinking event and its location to a search area of only five nautical miles in the north Pacific using recent acoustic events that were recorded by these devices. This location was over hundreds of miles away from where the Soviets were looking but at a depth of 16,000 (4,900 meters) making it nearly impossible to recover using current technology. An American submarine, the USS Halibut was able to officially identify K-129 and photographed the wreck on the ocean floor after a three-week visual search. Based on these photographs, the Americans were able to determine the likely presence of surviving nuclear torpedoes and missiles that made recovery of K-129 very tempting.
However, there was no way to reach the sub, as it was nearly 3 miles below the surface. In 1970 a group of advisors within the US government, led by Henry Kissinger, got together to solution a way around this. This group, after receiving approval from President Nixon, reached out to a company owned by Howard Hughes, called Global Marine Inc (the Glomar in Glomar Explorer is a composite of Global Marine), who specialized in deep sea drilling and mining to develop a ship that could house and support the recovery operation. The operation was named Project Azorian. While Global Marine was “building” the ship, in reality Hughes and his senior staff had almost zero involvement in the project and it was spearheaded by the CIA and had involvement from other contacted companies, like Lockheed. The ship was outfitted with a huge claw that the crew nicknamed “clementine” that was designed to be lowered to the ocean floor, grabbing the sub, and raising it from the depths into the ship’s moonpool, never allowing the sub to be seen or give any indication what the ship was doing. Once the ship was built, the CIA had it undertake a test run which was successful and the Glomar Explorer set off on in 1974, arriving on the sub wreckage site on July 4.
From the start, the ship was shadowed and watched by the Soviet Navy who were tipped off about the operation. The Soviets did not believe the Americans had found the sub and even if they did, recovery would be impossible. They further ignored intelligence that indicated the Americans developed a recovery ship just for this purpose. However, the CIA crew on board were nervous about potential boarding action from the soviets, raising the alert to the point that the crew instructed to be prepared to arm themselves and to burn documents at a moment’s notice. The CIA also stacked numerous containers on the helipad of the ship in order to prevent any Soviet helicopters from landing on it. However, and rather anti-climatically, the Soviet vessels departed after about two weeks of shadowing the American operation.
When it finally came time to raise the sunken K-129 from the ocean floor, the claw, Clementine, suffered a catastrophic failure. Global Marine staff on board reported the steel on the claws used to stabilize the sub, not just Clementine, failed due to the conditions of the operation and the sub split into sections, falling back to the ocean floor. Only the bow was recovered, which contained nuclear torpedoes, but the missiles and the cryptography equipment were all lost, along with most of the crew remains. Six soviet sailors were recovered, and the Americans buried them at sea using Russian burial manuals to make sure they were buried with respect. In order to prove the corpses were not mishandled, the Americans even filmed the burial, which can be found online today. Overall, the recovery was considered a failure, even though part of the sub was recovered, including the ship’s bell which was returned to the Soviets as a diplomatic gesture.
Project Azorian, while not achieving the majority of its objectives, was immensely embarrassing to the soviets, who did not even respond once the project was eventually revealed by the press. The fact the Americans were able to find the sub so quickly and so far away from where the soviets were looking for added insult to injury, without even addressing that the Americans also probably recovered soviet secret documents and insight into secret tech used onboard Soviet submarines. The project also has spawned an extremely famous phrase in English for when the CIA was asked about the existence of the project, a CIA representative responded with “I can neither confirm nor deny” the existence of documents related to the project which is now known as the Glomar response. The press was able to get wind of the project when a break-in of another Hughes owned company revealed its existence in documents that were then leaked to the press, with the story going public in in 1975. To this day however, the exact location of K-129 and details of exactly what was recovered from the submarine are kept secret, despite classification efforts. The Glomar Explorer was eventually actually used for mining and then years later sold off for scrap. As for the sinking cause of K-129, it is still disputed but the official cause is that the sub went below operating depth while in snorkel mode, causing the sinking, compounded by crew and mechanical failures.