More than three miles of Pacific water lay between the Hughes Glomar Explorer and its target in the summer of 1974. On the bottom, 16,500 feet down, rested the wreck of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine. The ship above it was presented to the world as a deep-sea mining vessel, and its real job, under the CIA program called Project AZORIAN, was to lift part of that submarine to the surface.
The agency now tells that story in its own museum. The cover story, the machine and the partial result are all on the record there.
The CIA Museum’s Project AZORIAN exhibit begins in 1968, when K-129, “a Soviet Golf II-class submarine carrying three SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles,” sailed from Petropavlovsk on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula for a patrol station in the Pacific. “Soon after leaving port, the submarine and its entire crew were lost,” the exhibit says. The United States later found the wreck “about 1,800 miles northwest of Hawaii on the ocean floor 16,500 feet below.”
A claw instead of a salvage crane
The exhibit says the CIA agreed to lead a recovery effort with support from the Department of Defense. The engineering answer came in 1970, when “a team of CIA engineers and contractors determined that the only technically feasible approach was to use a large mechanical claw to grasp the hull and a heavy-duty hydraulic system mounted on a surface ship to lift it.”
The size of the job is spelled out in the same exhibit: engineers had to lift “the huge 1,750-ton, 132-foot-long portion of the wrecked submarine from an ocean abyss more than three miles below,” and do it in total secrecy. The ship was fitted with what the museum calls “a huge claw-like capture vehicle.” A review by David Robarge in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, published in March 2012, notes the capture vehicle “was nicknamed ‘Clementine,'” and that Global Marine, Inc., a California firm, oversaw the ship’s construction.
The Howard Hughes cover
The cover story borrowed a famous name. The museum says the ship was “ostensibly built and owned by billionaire Howard Hughes, who provided the plausible cover story” that it was “conducting marine research at extreme ocean depths and mining manganese nodules lying on the sea bottom.”
The ship even brought some nodules home. A separate CIA Museum artifact page for a manganese nodule says the Hughes Glomar Explorer “set sail into the Pacific Ocean on 20 June 1974,” and that “its true mission was to raise a Soviet K-129 ballistic missile submarine.” The nodule on display, the page says, is one the ship actually recovered from the Pacific.
On site July 4, 1974
According to the exhibit, the Glomar Explorer sailed from Long Beach, Calif., “arrived over the recovery site on 4 July 1974 and conducted salvage operations for more than two months under total secrecy.”
The lift did not go as planned. “However, when the submarine section was about halfway up, it broke apart, and a portion plunged back to the ocean bottom,” the exhibit says. “Crestfallen, the Glomar crew successfully hauled up the portion that remained in the capture vehicle.” The ship never raised the whole submarine, and the CIA’s own summary acknowledges that “Project AZORIAN failed to meet its full intelligence objectives.”
The agency’s verdict is still favorable. In the same sentence, the exhibit says the “CIA considered the operation to be one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.”
How the secret came out
The program unraveled through a burglary. According to the CIA’s March 17, 2020 story on the exposure of Project AZORIAN, thieves broke into the offices of the Summa Corporation and stole secret documents. On Feb. 7, 1975, the Los Angeles Times “published an account that made connections between the robbery, Hughes, CIA, and the recovery operation,” the CIA account says.
The government’s reply outlived the ship’s cover. The administration “neither confirmed nor denied any of the stories in circulation,” the CIA story says, “creating the notorious statement that has come to be known as the ‘Glomar Response.'” The museum exhibit says further recovery operations were canceled after the newspaper’s report.
The ship outlasted the program. The museum records that the Hughes Glomar Explorer was later renamed the GSF Explorer and put to commercial use.
Top image: The Hughes Glomar Explorer at sea. Image Credit: U.S. Government photo — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.