The Glomar Explorer
Since I have been on a Cold War kick lately, I thought I would look into one of the most outrageous events of that 40-year long ideological conflict involving no less then, the eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes, the Central Intelligence Agency, (CIA), and a sunken Russian nuclear missile submarine.
Starting in 1971, Global Marine Development Inc., a company owned by Howard Hughes, began construction on an $350 million dollar ocean-going mining ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer. It’s mission, at the time, as described by Hughes, was to extract minerals from the deep ocean floor. This was a developing notion then that the ocean floor could be mined, and everyone bought into the idea. But the deep-sea drilling platform was actually built for the CIA to recover the Soviet submarine, K-129. The sub had sunk due to an unknown accident in very deep water at 16,500 feet and was located some 1,560 Northwest of Hawaii. Since a large U.S. Naval salvage ship would be obvious, Hughes was used as a cover to build an innocent looking ship that could secretly recover the sub.
In 1974, code named Project Azorian, the mining ship had recovered a part of the K-129, but as the section was being lifted to the surface, a mechanical problem with the grapple caused the piece to break apart. Still, the remaining recovered section held two nuclear torpedoes, cryptographic machines and the bodies of six Soviet submariners, who were later reburied at sea. The submarines nuclear missiles and code books that were eagerly desired, were not in the parts of the ship that were recovered.
The facts of the project became public in 1975 but were neither confirmed of denied by the CIA. This tactic became known as the Glomar Response and in the years following, was used to counter all sorts of public and journalistic inquires including Freedom of Information Act requests. Unconfirmed reports that most of the sub had been eventually recovered were never verified. While the Glomar Explorer had a huge lifting capacity there was no interest in using it for anything else because of the great cost in operating the ship. It was mothballed for a while by the Navy and later upgraded and leased to other companies for deep ocean drilling projects. In 2015 it was retired and broken up for scrap in China.
(In true James Bond fashion, the bottom of the Glomar Explored opened to lower massive grappling claws, capable of bring up parts of a submarine and hiding it inside the ship. The bottom image is a fanciful CIA illustration of how the ship worked.)
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