In 1975, the CIA calls on one of it’s lawyers to assist them on how to approach Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about an ongoing operation which has been leaked to the press.
Within half an hour, the CIA lawyer has devised what to say, and which is known as the Glomar response,“we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request” – the product of extraordinary circumstances, stemming from one of the most massive, if not the most massive, covert operation ever handled by the CIA.
Most of the great generals of both Axis and Allies, fought in both World Wars, as well some high ranking professional soldiers – the last thing anyone wanted was WW3.
The only real super powers after World War II, were former allies the United States (US) and Soviet Russia(USSR), but each had wildly different ideologies, this meant they were no longer allies, but enemies, and the clash of these two civilizations , started a new kind of era called the Cold War.
It was a high stakes, life or death game, involving , deadly spy agencies such as the KGB and CIA , proxy wars, brinkmanship, propaganda, alliances with other countries, foreign aid, and an all encompassing fear- no one wanted to lose, the tension was so heavy and the ideology so polarizing ,in his speech at Fulton Univ. in Missouri, it led Churchill to say an Iron Curtain had descended between the two, super powers – the curtain symbolized what is hidden between Communist and Democratic nations, the iron symbolized it was impenetrable.
This line was very surprising to audiences in both, the United States and Great Britain because up until then, the Soviet Union had been seen as a helpful ally who had played a major role in ending the German threat to Europe.
This phrase changed the way that the West began to view the Soviet Union.
Churchill called for stronger alliances against Soviet Expansion, warned of Germany’s future threat, and predicted the consequences of Communist government.
Churchill’s comments about the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union now represented a feeling that many Western countries had about the Soviet Union’s acquisition of land in Eastern Europe and felt that the Soviet Union was aggressively taking land and would be responsible for the start of another war.
In his speech, Churchill emphasizes that Communists are evil and wicked and commit appalling acts to the free world.
Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe (Eastern Bloc), had established friendly governments in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.
Stalin believed he was creating a buffer zone, a line of like-minded countries who could be a first line of defense in the event of an attack from the west –these countries became known as Soviet Satellite States.
Nine days after Churchill’s speech, Stalin was interviewed and asked about his opinion on Churchill’s address to Western countries.
He disagreed with much of Churchill’s speech and gave reasons for Soviet expansion in Europe.
Stalin also accused Great Britain and the United States, of being “Warmongers” and of witholding information about the atomic bomb.
The remaining Allied forces understood the death and destruction of dangerous ideologies, after the war, it was felt to maintain peace, you had to maintain command and control, anything outside of that was perceived as a looming threat, which could only be stymied by mutually assured destruction (MAD) a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
During the Cold War, and the vehement paranoia surrounding it,would cause the construction of massive nuclear silos , bunkers and even smaller ones to fearful citizens for private use.
It would also send children under their desks for “duck and cover drills”, which after the Cold War was over here in Texas, they would just change the name of it to tornado drills.
During the Korean War, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on the north, more than the entire amount used over all of the Pacific Theater in World War II, the United States did all that it could to ensure a stable, non-communist government remained in power in South Korea.
By 1953 , the war ended, North Korea and South Korea signed an armistice agreement, the United States has played a direct role in protecting the southern, democratic nation.
The U.S. even went so far as to station atomic weapons in the south in 1958, violating the rules of the armistice agreement.
The Vietnam War brought an increasing number of American troops to the region, making the United States and South Korea even closer allies.
The growing American involvement in Vietnam led North Korean leaders to believe their country might be next, and the number of violent attacks on the South Korean and American militaries rose accordingly.
While only 32 incidents occurred on the heavily fortified DMZ (the border between North and South Korea) in 1964, that number rose to around 500 by 1967.
By 1968, the North Korean regime was ready to launch an assault—an assassination attempt on South Korean President Park Chung-hee in the presidential mansion, known as the Blue House.
A 31-man commando team infiltrated South Korea on January 21 of that year, but were detected before they came close to Park, and all but two men were killed in the ensuing firefight.
Just 2 days later, January of 1968, North Korean torpedo boats and submarine chasers successfully surrounded and captured the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence ship patrolling international waters that had few weapons with which to defend itself.
Of the ship’s 83 crew members, 1 was killed in the attack, while the 82 left were taken as prisoners.
This sparked fear in the US, that the Soviets or it’s communist allies, stole the code books, it was a credible threat, because after all, , espionage is how nuclear secrets were leaked to Russia, in the first place, so it created and interest in the US, for retaliation, because if left unchecked it would only embolden the enemy if they thought there would be no repercussion and give them a lead on sensitive and guarded information, it is with this back drop the taking of k129, was set in motion.
The USS Pueblo still remains in N. Korea to this day.
Just before daylight, on February 25, 1968, the ballistic-missile submarine K-129 -a Soviet Golf II submarine — carrying nuclear ballistic missiles tipped with four-megaton warheads and with a crew of 98, a Ukrainian commander, her mission is a routine patrol skims out of its berth — suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii.
Then, on March 11, as the story goes, catastrophe: There’s an explosion!
K-129 loses propulsion, can’t blow ballast, in a matter of minutes, just like that, 2,820 tons of metal capable of launching a nuclear attack on America tumbles 3 miles to the ocean floor.
For what ever reasons, neither country has disclosed what caused it to sink.
The Soviets undertook a massive, 2-month search, but never found the wreckage.
However, the unusual Soviet naval activity prompted the U.S. to begin its own search for the sunken vessel, which the US found in August 1968, to the US, the soviet sub, if recovered, would be a treasure trove for the intelligence community.
The Russians agonized and searched.
Wrapped inside the sub’s fire-ravaged hull lay her codes, code books, missiles, and nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
K-129 was a gold mine of intelligence. We wanted it, we found it.
And Russia didn’t have a clue.
Of course, that wasn’t any consolation to the American spy apparatus in those first months.
Sure, we had located K-129, but now what?
No one had ever thought about recovering something from that depth—certainly not an enemy sub, in a raging Cold War, and with the specter of a very real war should the Russians – find out.
Not only could US officials examine the design of Soviet nuclear warheads, they could obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes, so begins the CIA covert operation called Project Azorian.
Perspective?
The Titanic lay at only 12,500 feet, almost a mile shallower.
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is presumed to be at around 15,000.
There’s still hope of locating its data recorder, but you don’t hear anyone discussing bringing up the fuselage.
K-129 was deeper still.
Almost 17,000 feet down, in an era before modern computing.
(Your iPhone has more processing speed than anyone in the 1960s did.)
It seemed hopeless… or did it?
The Americans set to the nearly impossible task of recovering the potential treasure trove of Soviet secrets from 17,000 ft – or 3.2 miles – beneath the surface of the North Pacific without tipping off the Russians.
To achieve such a Herculean task, the CIA needed to reinvent the science of deep sea recovery with the help of some of the best marine engineering minds of the time.
University of Michigan Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NAME) alumni including Charles Cannon (NAME ’68), Chuck Canby (NAME ’69), John Hollett (NAME ’68), and Steve Kemp (NAME ’70) were there to answer the call.
Howard Hughes
To keep the operation covert, the U.S. intelligence community asks eccentric billionaire inventor Howard Hughes to assist in a cover story, that he wants to recover some manganese nodules from the depths of the ocean.
Never mind at this point Hughes by this point is a recluse and wears kleen-x boxes for shoes.
In 1969, the CIA assembled a small task force of engineers and technicians for Project Azorian, to come up with a concept for recovering the submarine.
The technological and logistical obstacles were considerable.
How could the U.S. salvage a 2,500-ton submarine, sitting on the ocean floor, at a depth of 16,500 feet?
And, how could the U.S. conduct such a large-scale operation without arousing suspicion or being detected by Soviet reconnaissance?
Ideas floated , blow it out of the water with explosives, or add pontoons for and float it up, but the obvious became apparent they would need to construct a massive vessel — dubbed the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE) — to recover the sub -more than just a giant ship — it was a giant secret, possibly the biggest and strangest covert operation the CIA pulled off during the Cold War.
The top-secret mission : use a claw (or capture vehicle) built into the bottom of a ship outfitted to look like a mining vessel to grunt-lift the sunken submarine, equipped with three nuclear missiles, into a secret moonpool in the bottom of the vessel.
The problem?
Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. The technology for such a mission hadn’t been developed yet. And they had to do it while inquisitive Soviet ships and helicopters kept a close watch.
The plan involved three vessels:
1) An enormous recovery ship with an internal chamber and fitted with a bottom that could open and close.
This ship would use a docking leg system that would, in effect, turn it into a stable platform for using a lifting pipe to raise and lower a capture vehicle
2)“capture vehicle” fitted with a grabbing mechanism that would be designed to align with the hull of the sub. The capture vehicle would be secretly assembled
3) massive barge with a retractable roof.
The barge would be submersible, so that it could slip beneath the ocean, under the recovery ship, open its roof and deliver the capture vehicle — all the while remaining hidden from any potential reconnaissance.
The CIA contracted the Summa Corporation — a subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company owned by billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes — to build the 618-foot-long, 36,000-ton recovery vessel, which was dubbed the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE).
On June 20, 1974, Glomar left her berth in Long Beach.
By the Fourth of July, she was in place, floating over the target, about 1,500 miles off Hawaii, and she had company. For 2 weeks, the Soviet salvage ship SB-10 sat nearby and watched.
Above deck, every half hour or so, her crane would pick up another “double” of steel pipe and add it to the ever-lengthening extension. “Like a giant praying mantis,” -Ray Feldman
Project managers estimated a more than 40% chance of success — an acceptable figure, since the estimates for high-risk, innovative endeavors seldom went higher than 50%.
Below deck was where the real action was.
From Glomar’s underside, the pipe was extending farther and farther, its claw descending toward the sea floor, preparing for a feat unlike anything ever attempted.
The mangled sub, after all, wasn’t wrapped in a neat and tidy package.
“It’s like trying to pick up a piece of Jell-O,” retired Global Marine engineer Sherman Wetmore says.
“You go down with a fork, and maybe if it’s cold enough the Jell-O will stay together. Maybe.”
Global Marine had convinced the CIA there was only one way to do it: a “grunt lift.” , like a dead lift at the gym.
You reach down toward the floor, grab a barbell loaded with, say, 275 pounds, and in one smooth motion stand up. That’s it.
But put that same barbell aboard a rowboat in a choppy lake and try to do the same thing.
Your balance is instantly challenged. Now attach millions of pounds of steel pipe and claw and, of course, a submarine, all while the seas of the Pacific Ocean swell.
There were some mechanical problems that first month, but the pipe continued to make its way down, and by the beginning of August the tines of the capture vehicle were being forced into the soil around K-129.
Her legs, designed to remain at the bottom—like the lower portion of the lunar module did on the moon—gave the initial stabilization she needed to break free of the sand, and Sherman Wetmore announced, “We have liftoff.”
Altogether, 17 million pounds, 6 years, and $800 million (more than $2 billion today) worth of unparalleled espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency hanging in the balance—the whole awkward configuration stretched like a rubber band.
Yet it worked. For the first time since March 1968, K-129 began to move.
Then, trouble.
Early on August 1, 1974, there was an issue with the heave compensator, the part of Glomar’s pipe-lifting system that made adjustments for the swells of the sea.
As the crew worked to repair it, the capture vehicle and the sub were temporarily lowered back onto the ocean bottom.
20 hours later, the lifting resumed.
By August 4, Clementine was up some 7,000 feet when the crew of Glomar suddenly felt a shudder. “I went up to the control center, and everything looked normal there,” Sharp says. “They’re all still looking at the submarine and the claws, and I said, ‘You know, you sure you got all the targets there?’ ”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” came the response.
And then: “Oh, wait a minute—we haven’t refreshed the closed-circuit TV.”
“They were looking at old images,” Sharp says. “They refreshed the closed-circuit images and . . . gone.”
In an instant, a big chunk of K-129, six years in the taking, tumbled back to the ocean floor. A fter all that, Sharp says, “it fell away.”
After part of the sub fell away, and after some initial (highly unrealistic) demands from Langley that they try to pick it up again—Dave Sharp had the unenviable job of telling his bosses it was not in the cards—the Glomar crew continued pulling up pipe. 2/3- of their haul might have fallen away, but the men aboard Glomar knew they still had something on the line.
As if this crisis weren’t stressful enough, that ragtag crew aboard the Soviet tugboat was only 150 feet away.
The closer the remains (of the remains) of K-129 got to the underside of Glomar, the more she began to burp up bits and pieces of debris.
Were the Russians seeing this?
No.
On August 6, 1974, with their lost submarine literally right under its nose, the Soviet boat decided it had seen enough of all this “deep ocean mining,” and left for home.
As the tugboat passed Glomar for the final time, the Russians rendered an unexpected salute: They dropped their pants and mooned.
“The Soviets cheered and blew their whistle and took off across the horizon,” Sharp says. “We never saw ’em again.”
A month later, it was all over.
Even with the loss, we had managed to do the impossible, an effort so ambitious that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers cites AZORIAN as one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time.
And yet, 40 years later, the biggest question about Glomar lingers: What did we get?
Officially, that part of the tale is still top-secret
Two weeks after the Glomar pulled up the piece of K-129, Sharp received a package aboard the ship. In it were the cremated remains of John Graham, the ship’s designer from Global Marine, who had died on shore while the mission was ongoing. “Just a plastic bag of ashes,” Sharp says. “He decided he wanted to be buried from that ship, that it was the finest thing he felt he’d ever done in his career.”
The cover story was that the recluse and eccentric billionaire was getting into the mining business and that the Explorer was looking for potentially valuable rare-earth mineral deposits known as manganese nodules.
As Project Azorian developed, Seymour Hersh sniffed a story, but the CIA successfully convinced The New York Times to suppress publication.
A year later a journalist, Ann Phillippi, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the Glomar Explorer and the CIA’s attempts to censor press coverage.
The CIA, questionably citing FOIA law, claimed it could “neither confirm nor deny” that documents about either the ship or the censorship existed; a judge agreed.
The term “Glomar response” stuck. And so did the the ability for the CIA (and the entire US government) to refuse to confirm or deny the existence of documents in response to FOIA requesters.
It is also referred to as the, The Glomar Denial, because it aims to add no information to the public domain.
After the National Security Archive posted the CIA’s history of Project Azorian, retired CIA officer David Sharp, who served on the crew of the Glomar Explorer, was finally able to publish his book on the Project, The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-armed Soviet Sub.
What caused K-129 to sink, is not known, and debatable speculation is all that remains, which will be covered label, but first is how the CIA recovered this sub.
Conspiracy theories that have swirled, attempting to fill the void where official silence has reigned.
One of them is the K-129 was taken over by rogue Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict.
But the conflict was to be between the US and China, and that the sub had powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.
Russian Naval historians, like Nikolai Cherkashin, are not only insulted by this take on the cause of the K-129’s demise, they say the true cause is much easier to pinpoint: They say an American vessel, possibly the USS Swordfish, collided with the Soviet submarine.
Despite the fact that the US government has turned over many documents about Project Azorian and what it found to the Russian government, many in the Russian Navy stand by their theory that it was far too easy for the US to locate the K-129 on the bottom of the Pacific, given the technology of the time.
According to these theories, Project Azorian was nothing more than an elaborate cover-up disguised as… an elaborate cover-up.
We can neither confirm nor deny that we exactly understand how that would have worked in practice or execution.
Retired Capt. 1st Rank Pavel Dementiev said the sub’s captain, Vladimir Kobzar, and his commanding officer, Rear Admiral Viktor A. Dygalo, were both experienced and talented naval officers.
Only press leaks, declassified documents, and the men who were there can confirm whatever happened.
Author Josh Dean and three NAME alumni who worked on the top-secret CIA mission recently visited the department to tell the tale of one of our nation’s largest covert ops.
As for the Nuclear Arms Race:
sources:The Spies Next Door
Confirmed: The CIA’s most famous ship headed for the scrapyard
Fifty Years Ago, North Korea Captured an American Ship and Nearly Started a Nuclear War
How The C.I.A.’s Project Azorian Attempted To Steal The Soviet K-129 Nuclear Submarine