That Time The CIA And Howard Hughes Tried To Steal A Soviet Submarine
Source: io9.com
Recently declassified documents reveal new details about Project AZORIAN: a brazen, $800-million CIA initiative to covertly salvage a Soviet nuclear submarine in plain sight of the entire world.
The story begins in March 1968, when a Soviet Golf II submarine — carrying nuclear ballistic missiles tipped with four-megaton warheads and a seventy-person crew — suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, some 1,900 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii. The Soviets undertook a massive, two-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 was found in August 1968.
The submarine, if recovered, would be a treasure trove for the intelligence community. Not only could U.S. officials examine the design of Soviet nuclear warheads, they could obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes. And so began Project AZORIAN. The U.S. intelligence community commissioned Howard Hughes to construct a massive vessel — dubbed the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE) — to recover the sub. The ensuing salvage operation, which began in 1974, was only a partial success; the U.S. was planning to embark on a second attempt when, in 1975, the story was leaked to the press, and the operation was canceled.
In the years that followed, it was notoriously difficult to get information on Project AZORIAN beyond the details that were published in the newspapers. In response to a FOIA request, the CIA refused to release any documents, saying that it could "neither confirm or deny" any connection with the Hughes Glomar Explorer. (As a result, the phrase "neither confirm or deny" became popularly known as the "glomar response" or "glomarization.")
In 2010, the CIA permitted the publication of a heavily redacted, 50-page article describing Project AZORIAN that had appeared in a fall 1978 issue of the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. And, in recent years, veterans of the operation have come forth to tell their stories.
Now, however, we have even more details, thanks to the publication of the latest volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). Compiled by State Department historians, the FRUS series is an invaluable resource, containing declassified documents that include diplomatic cables, candid internal memos and minutes of meetings between the president and his closest advisors. For anyone who has the stamina to read through these 1,000-plus page volumes, it’s a unique opportunity to experience history as it happened.
The most recent FRUS, National Security Policy: 1973-1976, contains some 200 pages on Project AZORIAN. And it doesn’t disappoint.
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