Project Azorian: The CIA's Billion-Dollar Heist

NARRATOR (JAMES): It is the summer of 1974. In the middle of the vast, rolling Pacific Ocean, a ship unlike any other is holding station. It’s called the Hughes Glomar Explorer. To the casual observer—and to the Soviet spy trawlers watching nearby—it looks like a deep-sea mining vessel, a eccentric billionaire's latest venture to harvest manganese nodules from the ocean floor. But thousands of feet below the surface, a steel claw the size of a building is descending into the abyss. Its target isn’t rocks. It’s a 2,000-ton tomb containing nuclear secrets. I'm James, and this is Deep Dive. Today, we are uncovering Project Azorian. Joining me is naval intelligence historian, Robert. Robert, welcome.

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): Thanks for having me, James. It’s a pleasure to discuss one of the most audacious intelligence operations in history.

NARRATOR (JAMES): Audacious feels like an understatement. We're talking about the CIA trying to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from three miles down. Where does this story even begin?

The Target: K-129

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): It begins in March 1968. A Soviet Golf II-class ballistic missile submarine, the K-129, vanishes in the Pacific. It was carrying three nuclear missiles and a crew of 98 men. The Soviets knew it was gone, but they didn't know where. They launched a massive search, but after months of failure, they gave up. They assumed the ocean had swallowed it whole.

NARRATOR (JAMES): But the Americans knew where it was?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): Exactly. The U.S. had a secret weapon: SOSUS, the Sound Surveillance System. It was a network of underwater hydrophones designed to track Soviet subs. They picked up an acoustic anomaly—a catastrophic implosion. By triangulating the sound, U.S. Naval Intelligence pinpointed the wreck about 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii.

NARRATOR (JAMES): And they found it?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): They did. The USS Halibut, a special operations submarine, was sent to the site. They lowered a camera sled and found the K-129 sitting at 16,500 feet. To put that in perspective, James, that is deeper than the Titanic. The pressure down there is crushing. But the photos showed something incredible: the sub was relatively intact. That meant the codebooks, the nuclear warheads, and the encryption gear might still be there.

NARRATOR (JAMES): A treasure trove of Cold War secrets. But finding it is one thing; bringing it up is another. 16,000 feet? That sounds impossible for 1970s technology.

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): It was considered impossible. When the CIA proposed the idea, engineers laughed. They compared it to trying to lift a Volkswagen Beetle from the top of the Empire State Building using a thread of dental floss. But the potential intelligence value was too high to ignore. So, the CIA greenlit Project Azorian. The price tag? About 800 million dollars. That would be over 4 billion dollars today.

The Perfect Cover Story

NARRATOR (JAMES): That is a lot of taxpayer money to hide. How do you build a giant recovery ship without anyone asking questions?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): You get a cover story that is so big, so eccentric, that only one man could pull it off: Howard Hughes. The reclusive billionaire. The CIA approached Hughes, and he agreed to lend his name to the project. The cover was that Hughes’ company, Global Marine, was building a revolutionary ship to mine manganese nodules from the ocean floor. It was the perfect lie because it explained everything: the massive size of the ship, the secrecy, the moon pool—a giant opening in the bottom of the hull—and the heavy machinery.

NARRATOR (JAMES): The ship was the Hughes Glomar Explorer. And the machine doing the lifting... they called it 'Clementine,' right?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): That’s right. Clementine was the 'capture vehicle.' Imagine a massive mechanical claw with hydraulic fingers, designed to wrap around the submarine’s hull. The plan was to lower Clementine on a pipe string—section by section—catch the sub, and pull it up into the ship's moon pool, all while staying perfectly stationary in the open ocean.

The Lift and the Leak

NARRATOR (JAMES): So, flash forward to 1974. The Glomar Explorer is on site. The claw goes down. What happens?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): This is the heartbreak of the mission. They actually hooked the submarine. They began the lift. They got it thousands of feet off the bottom. But as they were raising it, the strain was too much. Several of the claw’s fingers sheared off. The submarine broke apart. Two-thirds of the vessel, including the missile compartment and the code room, fell back into the abyss.

NARRATOR (JAMES): Oh, that is devastating. After all that effort.

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): It was a massive blow. They only recovered the forward thirty-eight feet of the submarine. It wasn't the intelligence coup they wanted. However, they did recover something else. Inside that wreckage were the bodies of six Soviet submariners.

NARRATOR (JAMES): What did they do with them?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): In a moment of remarkable humanity amidst the Cold War, the CIA gave them a formal military burial at sea. They filmed it. Years later, in the 1990s, the U.S. actually gave that footage to the Russian government. It showed American sailors honoring their Soviet adversaries.

NARRATOR (JAMES): The mission wasn't a total success, but the secrecy held... for a while.

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): Until 1975. A burglary at Howard Hughes' headquarters led to leaked documents. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh caught wind of the story for the New York Times. The CIA tried to suppress it, arguing national security, but eventually, the story broke. It was a sensation. The public realized that the mining story was a complete fabrication.

NARRATOR (JAMES): And this gave us a famous legal phrase, didn't it?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): It did. When journalists filed Freedom of Information Act requests about the project, the CIA didn't want to admit it existed, but they couldn't lie. So they issued a statement saying they could 'neither confirm nor deny' the existence of the records. That is known today as the Glomar Response.

"Strategically? Maybe. They missed the missiles and the key codes. But technologically? It was a marvel. It proved the U.S. could reach anywhere in the ocean."

NARRATOR (JAMES): Robert, looking back, was Project Azorian a failure?

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): Strategically? Maybe. They missed the missiles and the key codes. But technologically? It was a marvel. It proved the U.S. could reach anywhere in the ocean. And in the paranoia of the Cold War, simply making the Soviets wonder 'what else can they do?' was a victory in itself.

NARRATOR (JAMES): A 4-billion-dollar claw game played at the bottom of the world. Robert, thank you for taking us through this.

HISTORIAN (ROBERT): My pleasure, James.

NARRATOR (JAMES): This has been Deep Dive. I'm James, signing off.

Backgrounder Notes

Based on a review of the transcript regarding Project Azorian, the following concepts and entities have been identified for further elaboration to provide the reader with necessary context.

Manganese Nodules These are rock-like polymetallic concretions formed of concentric layers of iron and manganese hydroxides found on the vast abyssal plains of the deep ocean. During the 1970s, the global scientific community believed these nodules represented a future bonanza of rare earth metals, which made the CIA's cover story regarding deep-sea mining highly plausible to foreign observers.

Golf II-class Submarine (Project 629A) This was a specific classification of Soviet diesel-electric ballistic missile submarines designed to carry three R-21 nuclear missiles inside its sail. Unlike modern nuclear-powered submarines which can stay submerged indefinitely, these vessels had to periodically run snorkel masts to recharge batteries, making them noisier and more vulnerable to detection.

SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) A chain of deep-sea listening posts connected by underwater cables, originally developed by the U.S. Navy in the 1950s to track Soviet submarines. The system utilizes the "deep sound channel" (or SOFAR channel), a specific layer of ocean depth where sound waves can travel thousands of miles with minimal signal loss, allowing the U.S. to triangulate the implosion of the K-129.

USS Halibut (SSGN-587) Originally the first U.S. nuclear submarine designed to launch guided missiles, the Halibut was later retrofitted as a specialized espionage platform. It was equipped with side thrusters for stationary hovering and a "bat cave" hangar capable of deploying wire-guided cameras and remote-controlled vehicles to the ocean floor.

Moon Pool An opening in the floor or hull of a marine vessel that gives access to the water below, allowing technicians to lower tools or divers into the sea from a protected environment. On the Glomar Explorer, this feature was critical because it allowed the recovered submarine hull to be pulled completely inside the ship, hiding it from Soviet spy ships, satellites, and aerial reconnaissance.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Enacted in 1967, this federal law grants the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. The journalists mentioned in the text utilized this law to demand information about the Hughes Glomar Explorer, forcing the CIA to create a new legal defense to avoid answering.

The Glomar Response Derived from the court case Phillippi v. CIA, this is a legal precedent that allows a federal agency to refuse to confirm or deny the existence of requested records. It is used when even the admission of a document's existence (or non-existence) would reveal classified information or compromise national security.

Project Azorian: The CIA's Billion-Dollar Heist

The Target: K-129

The Perfect Cover Story

The Lift and the Leak

Backgrounder Notes

Sources

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