Project Azorian: Stealing a Soviet Sub

In 1968, a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine disappeared somewhere in the Pacific. The Soviets couldn’t find it, but the United States did – and what happened next involved Howard Hughes, a fake deep-sea mining company, a gigantic mechanical claw and a ship secretly designed around one nearly impossible mission. This week, we dive into Project AZORIAN, the CIA operation that attempted to steal K-129 from three miles beneath the Pacific Ocean without the Soviet Union realizing what was happening. Then we play the Yap Yap with Magician Cameron Zvara! 

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There was something strange happening under the world’s oceans in 1968. On January 25, the Israeli submarine  INS Dakar  disappeared in the Mediterranean with 69 people aboard. Two days later, the French submarine  Minerve  vanished south of Toulon with 52 aboard according to French records, and in May, the American nuclear submarine  USS Scorpion  went down in the Atlantic with all 99 members of her crew. In between those losses, on March 8, a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine designated K-129 disappeared somewhere in the Pacific. Four submarines belonging to four different countries were lost within a period of only a few months.

Finding something on the bottom of the ocean was a very different proposition in 1968 than it is today. Only eight years earlier, Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard had descended in the bathyscaphe Trieste to Challenger Deep, reaching roughly 35,800 feet below the surface. That trip was so extreme that the two men sat inside a small pressure sphere with walls about five inches thick, and during the descent an outer Plexiglas window cracked. The Navy had proven that humans could reach extraordinary depths, but finding and retrieving something the size of a submarine from miles below the surface was another problem entirely.

The ocean had also become one of the most important intelligence frontiers of the Cold War. American and Soviet submarines carried weapons, communications equipment, cryptographic material, sonar technology and information about how each country expected a nuclear war to be fought. A submarine belonging to the other side was essentially a floating collection of military secrets, except crews generally went to considerable lengths to prevent one from falling intact into enemy hands. K-129 offered the United States an opportunity that nobody could have planned.

K-129 was a Soviet Golf II-class diesel-electric ballistic-missile submarine. It sailed from the Soviet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in February 1968 for a patrol in the Pacific, carrying three SS-N-4 ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. It was expected to communicate during the patrol, but the expected transmissions never came. The Soviet Navy eventually realized something had gone terribly wrong and began searching a huge section of the Pacific for the missing submarine and its crew.

The Soviets did not know exactly where K-129 had gone down. The United States had an advantage because American monitoring systems had detected an unusual acoustic event in the Pacific around the time the submarine disappeared. A later CIA historical review notes that the crucial acoustic information came from hydrophones monitored by the Air Force Technical Applications Center, systems originally intended to help detect Soviet nuclear tests. Analysts used those recordings to narrow the search area considerably.

The Soviet search eventually ended without finding K-129. The Americans kept looking. The U.S. Navy sent the specially modified submarine  USS Halibut  into the area, and the wreck was eventually located on the Pacific floor, roughly 16,500 feet down and about 1,500 to 1,800 miles northwest of Hawaii, depending on how the location is described in different official CIA accounts. The Soviets had lost a submarine and did not know where it was. The United States knew where it was and did not tell them.

American intelligence officials now had to decide what to do with that information. The wreck represented a possible opportunity to examine Soviet missile technology and other strategic systems in a way that would normally have been impossible. The CIA eventually agreed to lead a recovery effort with support from the Department of Defense. What followed would become a six-year covert engineering program called  Project AZORIAN .

For years, books and news reports called the operation “Project Jennifer.” That name became so deeply associated with the story that you will still see it today, but CIA historian David Robarge notes that it is incorrect. JENNIFER was the codeword associated with the project’s security procedures. The actual operation to recover K-129 was AZORIAN.

There was no ship capable of simply sailing out, dropping a cable three miles down, grabbing a wrecked ballistic-missile submarine and hauling it aboard. CIA engineers estimated that the section they intended to recover was approximately 132 feet long and weighed about 1,750 tons. The CIA’s own museum now explains the problem with an analogy: imagine lowering a grappling hook from the top of the Empire State Building, grabbing a car at street level and hauling it back to the top. Then imagine doing that while making sure nobody watching the building realizes what you are doing.

By 1970, CIA engineers and private contractors had concluded that the most practical solution was a gigantic mechanical capture vehicle that could descend to the wreck, wrap its enormous arms around the submarine and lift it. But a machine capable of doing that required an equally specialized ship on the surface. So instead of finding a ship that could perform the mission, the CIA decided to build one.

That created another problem. You cannot secretly build one of the largest and strangest ships in the world without somebody asking what it is for. The vessel would require an enormous derrick rising above the deck, a system for handling long sections of lifting pipe, extraordinary station-keeping ability, huge amounts of power and a giant opening through the middle of the hull. Even if nobody knew exactly what the equipment did, it would be obvious that somebody was spending a fortune building something that had never existed before.

The CIA needed a cover story large enough to explain a gigantic ship, an enormous budget and revolutionary deep-ocean technology. They found it in Howard Hughes. Hughes was already famous for enormous, expensive and unconventional engineering projects, and the CIA approached him about providing the public identity behind the operation. The story would be that Hughes was entering an entirely new business – mining valuable manganese nodules from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

This was not complete nonsense. Manganese nodules really do exist on the ocean floor, and the possibility of commercially harvesting them was receiving serious attention. The CIA even preserved one of the nodules actually collected during the Glomar operation, which is now part of the Agency’s museum collection. The cover was effective because it involved a real resource, a plausible emerging industry and a billionaire famous for attempting enormous technological projects.

The ship was called the  Hughes Glomar Explorer , with “Glomar” derived from Global Marine, the company involved in designing and operating the vessel. Construction required technology that itself pushed the limits of marine engineering. In 1972, a special floating crane called the Sun 800 was built as part of the effort, capable of lifting 800 tons, more than any other crane then in existence. It was used to install the Glomar’s 630-ton gimbal platform, part of the system that would allow the ship to manage an enormous load while moving on the surface of the Pacific.

Inside the Glomar was the feature that made the deception possible: a huge central docking well commonly called the moon pool. Doors in the bottom of the ship could open directly to the ocean, allowing the capture vehicle and eventually the recovered submarine to enter the vessel without being visible from outside. The ship also carried equipment for feeding 60-foot sections of steel pipe downward, one after another, until the capture vehicle reached the seafloor. From a Soviet ship or reconnaissance aircraft, much of the important work could remain completely hidden beneath the hull.

The capture vehicle itself was enormous. Members of the engineering team nicknamed it  Clementine , and its mechanical arms were designed to close around the submarine wreck from underneath. The device was constructed under cover and then transferred to the Glomar from a specially designed submersible barge, allowing one of the most revealing pieces of equipment in the entire operation to be installed without sitting openly on a dock. CIA engineer Sherman Wetmore later remembered working 12-hour shifts with a team of roughly ten engineers during the operation.

All of this took years, and not everyone in the American government thought it was a good idea. According to a declassified CIA historical review, by late 1972 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy secretary of defense, the chief of naval operations and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency had all opposed continuing AZORIAN because of its cost, uncertain intelligence return and possible diplomatic consequences. CIA Director Richard Helms took the case to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon. Nixon allowed the project to continue.

The Glomar itself had to travel from the East Coast to California, and it was too wide to pass through the Panama Canal. That meant sailing around South America through the Strait of Magellan. In September 1973, it stopped at Valparaiso, Chile, and arrived there during the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. A covert CIA intelligence vessel showing up in a Chilean port during a coup in a country where CIA activities were already enormously controversial was, according to the later declassified Agency history, a coincidence.

By the spring of 1974, the engineering work was nearly complete. The U.S. Intelligence Board reviewed the operation again in April and May and gave it a favorable evaluation. On June 7, President Nixon approved the recovery mission, with one specific restriction: the actual recovery was not to begin until after he returned from a summit trip to Moscow on July 3. The Hughes Glomar Explorer sailed into the Pacific on June 20, 1974.

And when they finally arrived over the submarine, the CIA discovered that secretly building a 600-foot ship might have been the easy part. Because now they had to lower a giant claw three miles into the Pacific, grab a wreck that had been sitting there for six years, lift more than a thousand tons toward the surface – while Soviet ships were watching them do it.

We’ll get to that right after this.

The Glomar Explorer reached the recovery area on July 4, 1974. Maintaining its position over a specific point of the seafloor was essential because Clementine would be hanging beneath the ship on thousands of feet of pipe while ocean currents and surface waves pushed against the vessel. Operators began adding the 60-foot pipe sections one at a time, lowering the capture vehicle farther and farther beneath the ship until it had traveled more than three miles downward.

The cover story was now being tested in the real world because Soviet vessels appeared near the Glomar and watched. The Soviets knew that an unusual Howard Hughes ship was operating in the Pacific, but there was no obvious reason for them to connect a supposed deep-sea mining expedition with a submarine they had lost six years earlier and had never located. CIA accounts say Soviet ships monitored the Glomar for portions of the operation while the crew continued working under the manganese-mining cover.

Once Clementine reached the bottom, the operators had to maneuver it over the wreck. Its mechanical arms were positioned around the section of K-129 selected for recovery and closed beneath it. Then the process that had taken the capture vehicle down had to be reversed. Sixty-foot sections of pipe were removed one at a time as the enormous load slowly rose through miles of water toward the Glomar.

For a while, it worked. A Soviet ballistic-missile submarine that had been lying on the Pacific floor since 1968 was moving upward toward an American intelligence ship. The engineering team had successfully located the wreck, built an unprecedented recovery system, lowered that system more than three miles through the ocean and picked up a massive section of submarine. Then, during the ascent, part of the load broke away.

Official CIA accounts vary slightly on the exact point in the ascent when the failure occurred, describing the submarine as roughly one-third to halfway up when a large portion fell from the capture vehicle. What is certain is that the wreck broke apart and much of what the CIA had hoped to retrieve plunged back toward the Pacific floor. Clementine still held part of K-129, and the crew continued lifting what remained. Sherman Wetmore would tell CIA historians decades later that the failure still bothered him, saying, “Why the claw broke has continued to haunt me.”

Eventually, the surviving section reached the moon pool and disappeared inside the Glomar Explorer. The CIA had actually done it, although on a much smaller scale than intended. An American intelligence operation had secretly raised part of a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine from roughly three miles beneath the Pacific while Soviet vessels operated nearby. Exactly what intelligence was recovered has remained partly classified or disputed in public accounts, and responsible histories of AZORIAN avoid many of the spectacular claims that appeared in early newspaper reports. CIA’s official position is that intelligence collected during the operation contributed significantly to the broader American understanding of Soviet strategic capabilities.

One thing recovered from K-129 is known with certainty. Inside the section were the remains of six Soviet sailors. The Americans gave the men a formal military burial at sea, and the ceremony was filmed. In 1992, CIA Director Robert Gates gave Russian President Boris Yeltsin a copy of the burial footage, allowing the Russian government to see how the men had been treated eighteen years earlier.

The CIA wanted another chance. Planning began almost immediately for a second recovery operation aimed at the portion of K-129 that had fallen back to the bottom. The Glomar existed, the recovery equipment existed, the crew now had experience operating it, and the submarine was still down there. But a completely unrelated crime in Los Angeles had already started destroying the secrecy on which another mission depended.

In June 1974, shortly before the Glomar sailed, burglars broke into an office belonging to Hughes’ Summa Corporation in Los Angeles. Among the stolen material were documents connecting Hughes, the CIA and the Glomar Explorer. The CIA wanted those documents recovered and contacted the FBI, which brought in the Los Angeles Police Department. The investigation created exactly the kind of attention AZORIAN could not survive.

By the fall of 1974, journalists were hearing pieces of the story. CIA Director William Colby personally appealed to reporters and news organizations that had learned about the operation, asking them not to publish because another recovery attempt was being considered. Some initially held the story. On February 7, 1975, however, the Los Angeles Times published an article connecting the burglary, Hughes, the CIA and the submarine recovery operation.

The secret unraveled quickly after that. Investigative reporter Jack Anderson discussed the operation nationally on March 18, and reporters descended on Long Beach, where the Glomar was being prepared for another mission. The Ford administration refused to officially confirm or deny the reports. By June, the Soviets had placed a ship near the wreck site, effectively ending any realistic possibility that the Glomar could return unnoticed.

The government’s refusal to acknowledge the operation created one of AZORIAN’s strangest legacies. Journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking CIA records concerning the Agency’s attempts to prevent publication of stories about the Glomar. The CIA responded that it could “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the requested information. That formulation became known as the Glomar response, and federal agencies still use the term today when even acknowledging whether certain records exist could reveal protected information.

The White House canceled further recovery operations. K-129 remained on the Pacific floor, along with the portion that had slipped from Clementine during the first attempt. The Glomar Explorer, a ship designed around one secret assignment, suddenly had no secret assignment left to perform. It later participated in experimental ocean-mining work and was eventually mothballed before being converted decades later for commercial deep-water drilling.

Howard Hughes’ manganese-mining operation had been fiction, but some of the technology developed to make that fiction believable became very real. CIA credits AZORIAN with advancing deep-ocean heavy-lift and mining technology. Even the Sun 800 floating crane constructed to help build the Glomar survived long after the operation. More than fifty years later, after being renamed and modified, that same crane was used during the 2024 response to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The men who worked on AZORIAN were unable to talk publicly about much of it for years. When engineer Sherman Wetmore visited CIA headquarters decades later, he described the intense secrecy surrounding the project and remembered the pride among the engineers and intelligence officers involved. Standing in the CIA Museum looking at artifacts from the operation, including a Glomar crew patch, the flag that flew aboard the ship and a newspaper announcing the exposure of the project, Wetmore was asked how he had reacted when the secret finally appeared in the press. His answer was considerably less elaborate than the operation itself: “Well, I was mad!”

Today, the CIA openly displays pieces of a mission that once depended on nobody knowing it existed. There are Glomar artifacts in the CIA Museum, declassified histories explaining how the operation worked and even a manganese nodule preserved from the cover operation. The bizarre story about Howard Hughes building a giant mining ship was not really a story about mining at all. The CIA spent years creating an entire ship, a massive underwater claw and a fake commercial enterprise so it could sail into the Pacific and steal part of a Soviet submarine from three miles beneath the ocean – and the Internet Says It’s True.

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